The Best Man (4 page)

It was empty except for Josh Hunnicutt, who had to stand on tiptoes at the urinal. We were both at the sinks.

He gave me a nod. Then he reached in his jeans pocket and pulled out Natalie's phone to show me.

“Whoa,” I said. “Listen, Josh, that's stealing.” But I was grinning.

“Not if I don't take it home,” he said.

The one place Natalie had no hope of finding her phone was in the boys' restroom, right? We decided to put it up on the top of the wall of a toilet stall. Those walls don't go to the ceiling.

Josh climbed on a toilet. “Beam me up,” he said, and I swung him onto my shoulders. He weighed practically nothing.

So that was that. He planted the phone up there, and we made it to class with seconds to spare.

A while later, I got Lynette's note. We were taking a quiz when this crumpled piece of paper sailed onto my desk. It said:

MY PARENTS ARE GETTING A DIVORCE—

IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES.

Which was all new to me. And so was the word
irreconcilable
.

My mom hadn't said anything, even though she and Mrs. Stanley were really close. I was sorry. I thought about the Showalters, Jackson's parents, but I was sorrier for Lynette.

But we were taking a quiz, so it was more or less quiet. And from way off you could hear a tinny little song playing over and over. Natalie's phone was ringing from the boys' restroom. It was probably her mother.

Natalie herself spent the afternoon on the nurse's cot, though there wasn't a mark on her. It was going to take a couple of days before she'd confess to her mother that she'd lost her phone. But as we know, you don't slow down Natalie for long.

That would have been the day I found a grown man—in a suit—crying on our stairs when I got home. But that's another chapter.

I
came in the front hall and the man was sitting halfway up the stairs, between me and my room. His face was in his hands, and he was sobbing.

It was sad, and surprising. He must have been one of Mom's customers. Mom herself came out of her office door and saw me down here. Then she saw the man huddled on the stairs.

“Brian, pull yourself together and go home,” she called down to him. “Right now, please.”

He turned and looked up at her. “What home?” His face was wet. There were tears in his stubble.

“My son is standing right there, Brian, and he doesn't need to see this,” Mom said. “I don't need a parade of misery through my house.”

“Right. I'm sorry.” He climbed to his feet. “Sorry,” he said to me, and left.

What was this about? Mom turned back to her office, and pointed me inside.

Her office desk was in the big bay window. She settled into her chair and nodded me into the sofa across from it.

“Boy,” I said, “that man's really upset about his wedding plans.”

Mom sagged in her chair. “Archer, do you think I'm a wedding planner?”

Yes. Of course I did.

“Archer, I'm not a wedding planner. I'm a marriage counselor. I majored in
psychology,
heaven help me.”

Oh. Okay.

“People come to me when their marriages are in trouble or . . . falling apart. We talk things over very privately, very confidentially.”

Right. My brain took a small leap. “Say, listen, Mom. Was that man on the stairs Lynette's dad?”

Mom blinked at me. Then she sagged some more.
“I can't answer that, Archer. And don't say anything to Lynette about—”

“Lynette knows her parents are getting a divorce. It's why she beat up Natalie Schuster.”

“She couldn't know,” Mom said. “They've been very careful.”

But I'd kept Lynette's note. I fished it out of my pocket and handed it to Mom.

Then, speaking of misery parading through the house, the front door rattled, and Holly was home from high school.

She hit the stairs. Mom had read the note. Holly leaned in the door. “Why is a man in a Mazda crying in our driveway? And why do I even have to live in conditions like this?”

• • •

Kids know most things before their grown-ups know they know. We're older than we look. It's complicated. We're older than we act. But the whole fifth grade was in for a surprise. Lynette knew first and told me on Christmas Day.

She and her mom came to our house for dinner at noon. She was going to spend that evening with her dad, wherever he was. “Now it begins,” she said. “I'm this hundred-pound Ping-Pong ball, back and
forth between them. They can't get along with each other, so they cut me in two. I'm never going to do this to a child because I'm never having children. Period. End of story.”

“How do you know you won't have any children?”

“Because I'm never getting married.”

“How do you know that?” I said. “We're in fifth grade. How do you know all this stuff about the future?”

“Do you think
you
might want to marry me?” she asked, up in my face.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Then shut up,” she said. This was the mood she was in as Christmas closed in on us.

Christmas Eve, it had just been the four of us, and Dad's signature chili. After that he and Mom had put on some music and rolled back the living room rug to dance.

They're not great dancers, but they don't know this. They dip and swoop and gaze away into the Christmas tree. And it always ends with a song called “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

“It'd be sad,” said Holly, watching them from behind me, “if it wasn't so embarrassing. I'll be
going away to college. Far, far away. I won't be coming home for holidays. I won't Skype.”

Then the next day was a regular Christmas Day plus Lynette and her mom. Holly must have been there. I don't remember. But she wouldn't have been texting from the table because Grandma Magill was there. Dad and Uncle Paul got Grandpa Magill up the porch steps in his wheelchair. Grandma brought her famous candied parsnips.

I got some games, but it was an in-between Christmas. I wasn't too interested in clothes yet. The Ralph Lauren suit's coming, but not till next year.

The best present as usual was from Uncle Paul, earlier in December: a seat in the press box at Soldier Field for a Bears game. The Bears trounced the Dallas Cowboys 45 to 28 in wind chill at seven below. But to Bears fans it was a balmy day with a touch of spring in the air. We have to have something to believe in while the Cubs are hibernating.

• • •

On Christmas Day it was different seeing Lynette and her mother at the table. And as we know, Lynette wasn't in a great mood. Also, she was antsy because she had a secret.

“Want to see my room?” I asked her.

“Whatever,” she said. “Is it a mess?”

“Do you want to see it or not?”

We excused ourselves from the table as Uncle Paul was setting fire to the pudding. Not our kind of dessert.

I'd made my bed. I make it every Christmas. Lynette scanned my room, not too interested. She was wearing a Christmas sweater with fir trees on it. Her fists were on her hips. “How do you like my sweater?”

I didn't know the answer to this. “It's . . . okay?”

“It's a nightmare,” Lynette said, “like the rest of this Christmas.”

“Who gave it to you?” I asked.

“Santa,” Lynette said. “I could wring his neck.”

“Are you going to get around to telling your secret?” I said. “Because I've been thinking. If it has anything to do with your parents getting a—thinking about getting a divorce, maybe my mom can talk them out of it. She's a marriage counselor, you know.”

“I doubt it,” Lynette said. “My mom's changed her relationship status to ‘single' on Facebook.”

Then she slanted a look at me, so here came the big secret. “Guess who our new teacher's going to
be now that Mrs. Forsyth's gone home to have her baby.”

I couldn't.

“Guess who has a teaching certificate and needs a job.”

Still I had nothing.

“My mom,” Lynette said.

“Your mom?” I dropped down on my bed.

“Not only do I have to have a second Christmas dinner tonight with my dad at an Applebee's, but my mom's going to be my teacher. Season's greetings,” Lynette said. “Happy New Year.”

W
ord got out that Mrs. Stanley was going to be our teacher, starting in January.

“Two of them!” Natalie Schuster said when she heard. “Two overbearing, know-it-all, redheaded Stanleys, like one of them wasn't enough. I don't know what my mother's going to say. I should transfer out of that school. Honestly.”

If only.

You'd think it was Lynette who'd want to transfer. Picture Holly if our mom started teaching marriage counseling or whatever down at the high school. It'd be nuclear winter.

And Westside wasn't a big school. We had only
one fifth-grade class. It was Mrs. Stanley or nothing. We'd had a lady who came in to teach us art and music, but they'd downsized her.

Lynette was fairly cool about it. “It's not as bad as my dad leaving, and we need the money,” she said. “But Natalie's wrong as usual. My mom's not a know-it-all. She knows no math. She's in negative numbers with math. And she doesn't know where she is with geography. And history? Grammar? Not so much.”

“What did she major in?”

“Good question,” Lynette said. “And she knows nothing about fifth graders. Zip.”

“You're a fifth grader.”

“Would you call me typical?” said Lynette, up in my face.

“Not really.”

“It's my vocabulary,” she said. “I'm in fifth, but my vocabulary's in senior-year A.P. English and about to graduate. With honors. My vocabulary's going to be the valedictorian. But I'm only mature compared to you. You're really taking your sweet time, you know.”

“Time to what?”

“Mature,” Lynette explained.

• • •

On the first day back we were all present. It was flu and cold season, but we were fine: every Josh. Esther Wilhelm sitting tall. The two girls named Emma. Gifted Raymond Petrovich. Natalie with a new phone. Various other people I haven't mentioned. Russell Beale.

Mrs. Stanley didn't start from nothing. Lynette had tried to fill her in. For one thing, even though we were a no-phones-in-the-classroom school, Natalie could have hers because nobody wanted to deal with Mrs. Schuster.

But Lynette couldn't think of everything, so Mrs. Stanley made some rookie mistakes. She called us “boys and girls” instead of “people,” though that was better than “children.”

Luckily, Mrs. Forsyth had left some lesson plans behind. And we were more experienced than Mrs. Stanley. We knew where the worksheets were. If you wanted a worksheet on semicolons or bar graphs, see us. And we knew where all the Common Core stuff was squirreled away. We could find the special pencils for the standardized tests.

As Lynette said, Mrs. Stanley didn't know much about fifth graders. Russell Beale, for example. He
dropped off to sleep a lot, and when he did, he fell out of his chair. We were used to putting him back in it. But Mrs. Stanley was a little bit surprised the first time or two it happened.

It took her till spring to learn our names, except for Lynette and me and Natalie, whose hand was never down. But after she noticed there were seven Joshes, she'd just call out “Josh,” and one of them answered. They took turns. When she wanted to call on a girl, she'd say “Emma,” and one or the other would answer. Once in a while Esther Wilhelm would be an Emma and answer.

We liked Mrs. Stanley. All her quizzes were multiple-choice. But she just couldn't keep up with the paperwork, and there was a ton of it. We did the attendance report every morning and wrote somebody a pass to take it to the office. But we couldn't do it all. Printouts from the principal began to build up on Mrs. Stanley's desk.

Still, by April we figured it was smooth sailing to the end of the year. And we figured wrong. Before the week was over, we were in lockdown with a helicopter overhead. It was only a short lockdown, but we were the opening slot on the evening news.

• • •

Friday afternoons are always slower. Mrs. Stanley was at the blackboard trying to explain why you can't say “between you and I,” so we may have been doing grammar. The bell rang, and we were still thirteen and a half minutes from the end of school.

Mrs. Stanley turned from the blackboard with the chalk in her hand. The voice of the principal, Mrs. Velma Dempsey, came crackling over the PA. It was the same low-tech system Grandpa Magill had installed when the school was new.

“Secure classroom doors!” came Mrs. Dempsey's voice. “Children under their desks! Lockdown! Lockdown!”

But the lock on our door was missing. Raymond Petrovich and a Josh jumped up to shove Mrs. Stanley's desk toward the door.

A bunch of us rushed to help. When Lynette put her shoulder into it, the desk shot away. Papers went everywhere. We were as secure as we were going to be. But from what?

“All right, boys and—people,” Mrs. Stanley called out. “Under your desks.” Stretched out, Esther Wilhelm took up the floor space under two desks, and still there was more of her. Natalie was under hers with her new phone on speed dial to her mother.
Russell Beale was under his desk and already asleep.

We weren't too worried. Anything for a change. Between you and I, it was better than grammar.

Figures raced past the windows.

“Cops!” somebody said. “A SWAT team!” They clanked like they had handcuffs hanging off them. Another couple of minutes and a helicopter was overhead. It was WGN for the local news. We got network coverage later. Basically we were about to be famous, but that gets ahead of the story.

• • •

Except for the helicopter, it was quiet. We peered from under our desks. Russell Beale stirred. Mrs. Stanley was sitting up on her desk, barring the door. A yardstick from somewhere was in her hand. She looked fierce.

Mrs. Dempsey's voice crackled again out of the PA: “Disregard the previous announcement,” she said. “Resume the scheduled school day.”

Like that was going to happen.

We got up. An Emma was crying, but she cried at anything. She cried at morning announcements. We helped Mrs. Stanley off her desk. “Here, give me the yardstick, Mrs. Stanley,” Lynette said. She always called her mother Mrs. Stanley at school. The
helicopter faded away toward Chicago. We pushed the teacher's desk back in place.

The door opened, and in walked Mrs. Dempsey. Behind her came a man in uniform. A young guy in camouflage fatigues and boots with the pants tucked in. He looked like a desert warfare action figure come to life. His hair was buzz-cut, and he was built. Not too tall, but built. He looked like he'd stepped out of a movie.

“Whoa,” said several guys.

“Wow,” said several girls, including Lynette and in fact Esther Wilhelm, who never said anything unless she was being an Emma.

“Mrs. Stanley,” said Mrs. Dempsey, “here is your student teacher.”

“I'll have to get back to you, Mother,” Natalie said.

A student teacher?

We'd never had one. For all we knew, they always wore uniforms. And this one spit-shined his boots.

“Did he come in the helicopter?” somebody wanted to know. Because it would have been kind of neat if he'd been air-lifted in.

Mrs. Dempsey was in Mrs. Stanley's face, though Mrs. Stanley was bigger. “The university has sent him. Mrs. Forsyth was to oversee his student
teaching, but . . . here he is. He was to have his first mentoring session after school today. There has been paperwork on this. If you had kept up with it, Mrs. Stanley, you could have averted this fiasco.”

Averted.

Fiasco.

Whoa. Next to me Lynette stirred.

Mrs. Dempsey was looking at the papers curled in the corners of the room. “He arrived early and, I'm sorry to say, in uniform. Will you explain why, Mr. McLeod?”

All our eyes were on him. Mrs. Stanley's too. “I'm reporting for weekend training with my Guard unit,” he said. “The Illinois National Guard.”

The Illinois National Guard. How cool was that? You could see where he'd hang a row of grenades on his web belt. You could be pretty sure he had night-vision goggles.

“When Mr. McLeod entered school, Andy, the security guard, was not at his post,” Mrs. Dempsey said. “When Mrs. Rosemary Kittinger, the secretary at the front desk, saw a man in uniform, she jumped to the conclusion that he was armed and dangerous.”

Mrs. Dempsey still seemed to be aiming all the blame at Mrs. Stanley.

Lynette didn't like that. She could be very protective of her mother until she was about twelve. “How come Andy wasn't on duty?” Lynette's voice rang in the room.

Mrs. Dempsey wasn't used to being questioned by kids. She may never have been a teacher. But Lynette has a big mouth as we know. And in fifth grade she was just about the same size as Mrs. Dempsey.

“Since the school nurse had no record of Andy's flu shot, she called him in on his lunch break. The flu season is behind us, but better safe than sorry. Unfortunately, Andy has a problem of which we were unaware. Before the nurse could administer his shot, he fainted.”

Fainted! So this was why Andy was AWOL from his post. And what a great reason it was. The idea that six-foot-five, bulging-necked Andy passed out cold at the sight of a needle was awesome.

Josh Eichenberry fell to the floor, flat on his back. His eyes rolled up. His tongue lolled. He was being Andy.

“And so alone in the outer office with a uniformed man coming into school, Mrs. Kittinger alerted the police,” said Mrs. Dempsey. “We have a direct and dedicated line to the station.”

She was still giving Mrs. Stanley the evil eye because she hadn't kept up on her paperwork. The yardstick was in Lynette's hand. She was thinking about giving Mrs. Dempsey a good whack around back.

Mr. McLeod looked around at us. We looked back. The girls didn't even blink. Josh Eichenberry looked back from the floor.

Then Mrs. Stanley said, “I'm pleased to have you as a student teacher, Mr. McLeod.” She reached past the principal to shake his hand. “We of the fifth-grade classroom at Westside are happy to have you. We regret the welcome you've received from the school.”

Mrs. Dempsey's eyes snapped. Her mouth opened and shut again.

But this was Mrs. Stanley's classroom and
her
student teacher. And she wasn't Lynette's mother for nothing. She doubled down and took over.

“I'm sorry the first person you encountered in this school was hysterical and incompetent. And I'm sorry the security guard had fainted. Heaven help us if we ever really do find ourselves under siege.”

“That's all right, ma'am,” said Mr. McLeod. “You can always call out the National Guard.”

Mrs. Dempsey was melting down. I wondered if maybe Mrs. Stanley's teaching days were numbered. Lynette was wondering something similar.

Mrs. Stanley turned to us. There was chalk dust all down her front. “Boys and people, this is Mr. McLeod, our student teacher. What do you say to him?”

Search us. We stared. Esther Wilhelm was saying, just under her breath, “Wow wow wow wow.”

“You might start with ‘Good afternoon and welcome,'” Mrs. Stanley said, “and end with ‘Mr. McLeod.'”

“Good afternoon and welcome, Mr. McLeod,” we all said.

“Good afternoon, troops,” Mr. McLeod said.

Troops! That's all we called ourselves from then on. It was way better than boys and people.

“I am a new teacher,” Mrs. Stanley explained to Mr. McLeod, “and so I am just getting acquainted with these students myself, except, of course, for my daughter.”

Their heads both blazed in the room. But all of us except Natalie pointed to Lynette in case Mr. McLeod had missed her.

“And you will find them the usual mixed bag of fifth graders with a lot to learn,” Mrs. Stanley said.
“Their last teacher left to go on maternity leave. She seemed to have used her entire pregnancy as a lesson plan, so we may dispense with sex education. They think they know it all.”

Mrs. Dempsey jumped at the sound of sex education. “Now see here,” she said.

But it was true. If you wanted to know where babies came from, see us. We had the sonograms.

The end-of-school bell rang. But the PA was crackling again, with a secretary's voice. “Alert to Mrs. Dempsey! Alert to Mrs. Dempsey! The front doors are secured, but an anchorwoman from the ABC affiliate has just kicked in the lower glass panel. Alert to Mrs. Dempsey!”

Mrs. Dempsey pounded for the door, but it was blocked by a blond lady in heavy makeup with a cut on her knee. She had an ear bud in one ear. A mike was clipped to her dress. A cameraman and a lighting guy barged in behind her. The room went blinding bright, and we were all on TV. We were waving already.

“Now see here,” Mrs. Dempsey said.

“We're five seconds from going live,” the anchorwoman said to her. “If you're the principal, I'll need a name.”

But then she saw Mr. McLeod, and the bud fell out of her ear. She fumbled for it and picked up Mr. McLeod's name from the tape on his camo jacket. “Soldier, what's your rank?” she said, very breathy.

“Warrant officer, ma'am,” he said.

Then we were live. “Tell our viewers, Warrant Officer McLeod, what it's like to create a panic in a public school merely by wearing the uniform of the country you serve.”

Mrs. Dempsey cringed, and we went viral.

“I was just reporting for duty,” Mr. McLeod said. “Student teaching. I'm working on a master's in Elementary Education.”

But the anchorwoman was already on to her follow-up question. “And what's been your combat experience? Afghanistan? The Middle East, Lib—”

“My unit hasn't been deployed since I joined,” he said. “This school's about as close to combat conditions as I've come. You might want to see a medic about that knee.”

The bud fell out of the anchorwoman's ear again. Mr. McLeod was right about combat conditions. Somebody from Fox News was pounding on the window. Behind him parents were rioting because
they couldn't get in to collect their kids. It was basically chaos.