Chapter Text
Barbara was still married when she stood opposite Melissa in the teacher’s lounge, handing her a sparkly gift bag with a smile so coy and bright Melissa was desperate to kiss it off her lips.
Their annual Christmas tradition started many moons before that, when Melissa still had Joe, when their respective holiday time was spent in vastly different manners—Melissa avoiding her desire to tell Joe to fuck off , Barbara sending Christmas cards with a perfect family photo on their front; Melissa biting her tongue at every comment from her sister, or brother, or cousin, or whoever decided that that year was their year to put her down, while Barbara sent her videos of her family singing carols. Melissa would watch them alone, later, when Joe fell asleep, holding her phone between two palms and fighting the urge to call Barbara. When she would crawl into bed with Joe, Joe would stir, throw an arm over her, and Melissa would turn her back to him, close her eyes and remind herself that that’s the man she’s meant to love.
It didn’t last, in the end, of course it didn’t. Too many shouting matches. Too many nights spent on her sister’s couch while they were still talking, and too many offers from Barbara to host Melissa in her house that Melissa had had to decline after the one time she accepted, and found herself lingering in every corner of Barbara’s realized life, running her fingers over photos and decorations and kitchen utensils like a ghost returning to haunt a life she could have had.
So it didn’t last with Joe. But her tradition with Barbara did.
When she opened the sparkly gift bag, under the crinkly crepe paper lay a green scarf. Melissa pulled it out, dropped the bag and held it up to examine the material.
“Do you like it?” Barbara asked, watching Melissa with round and expectant eyes, a slight fear in them. “I noticed your old scarf was wearing out and I–” she started explaining, her nerves showing, though Melissa wasn’t sure why she should be worried about any of it.
“I love it, Barb,” she hurried to say, folding the scarf and holding it against her face to feel how soft it was. Her eyes fell shut as she smelled Barbara’s perfume on it, and she had to pull it away quicker than she would have liked to have it warming the skin of her cheek. Barbara reached over and mulled the wool between her fingers.
“Feels nice, does it?” she commented. Melissa stared at her, Barbara returning the gaze, her wedding ring shining under the candlelight that spread from every corner of the lounge. A blingy reminder of what Melissa shouldn’t be doing. Shouldn’t be feeling. Cannot help but wanting.
“Thank you,” Melissa said sincerely, the knowledge that Barbara paid attention to the state of her clothes shifting something inside her heart. She wrapped the scarf around her neck, Barbara’s perfume engulfing her.
“It suits you well,” Barbara said, words sitting heavy between them, her eyes a deep well of emotion making Melissa swallow something thick and unsayable.
“Green. Goes with my eyes.”
“For Christmas,” Barbara explained, twisting her wedding ring around her finger.
But when Barbara sent a hand to fix the scarf in place around Melissa’s neck, Melissa wondered if this is what she truly meant to say. If it fit her well, or if beautiful was the word that she was after; if it was green for Christmas, or because Barbara knew Melissa’s eyes better than anybody else could claim to know anything.
But these weren’t questions that Melissa could ask. These were the kind of questions better left unanswered.
When Melissa returned home, she unwrapped the scarf from around her neck and buried her face in it, breathing Barbara in. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. She could have told her. At that very moment, she could have told her. I love you. I know I shouldn’t, but I love you.
And when Barbara announced that she was getting a divorce, Melissa opened her door for her and drove her to her lawyer when Barbara’s head was spinning too strongly from the momentarily mess that her life had become; she let her sleep in her bed and took the couch; she talked to Taylor and Gina when their mother couldn’t explain to them that sometimes over thirty years of marriage do not mean anything more than that–a shared lifetime, a lifetime still to go trying not to regret time wasted.
She ran her hand down Barbara’s back and told her it’s never time wasted. But she couldn’t tell her the other thing, the thing that she had always excused not saying because of the ring on hers and Barbara’s fingers, then only on Barbara’s finger, and now, when none of them were wearing the weight of a marriage that wasn’t working, Melissa still found the words were not coming out.
With Barbara standing barefoot in her home, wearing one of Melissa’s Eagles t-shirts, her nails painted in a shade that matched Melissa’s lipstick, her perfume all over Melissa’s bed, Melissa’s mugs and wine glasses stained with Barbara’s lipstick, Barbara practically making a home out of the space that Melissa had allowed her to claim after the divorce–the words still did not come out.
I love you. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I love you. Do you see?
The longer she went without saying it, the harder it became to say. The harder it became to say, the stronger she felt it. It was both a relief and a nightmare that she had no real reason to hide anymore, aside from the inhibitions fortified during over twenty years of friendship, over twenty years of longing, over twenty years of uncertain touches and thinly-veiled conversations. It was easier, perhaps, to have had Gerald and Joe stop Melissa from letting a confession slip like an unholy song from between her lips. Because the only thing stopping her now is an unshakable fear of losing the best thing she ever had. Yet she never truly had her. And the longer the days stretched, the likelier it became that she never truly will.
Melissa is well-versed in the art of restraint, which is why, when she hears Gregory telling Janine “Here, let me,” a smile in his voice and a softness in the way he holds his shoulders next to her fellow second-grade teacher, she looks up from the quizzes that she’s grading, watches as Gregory reaches and holds Janine’s coffee cup while Janine opens the Gushers she got from the vending machine. Watches as Janine suppresses a smile that’s already starting to form, as she avoids Gregory’s eyes, as she says thanks and turns to talk to Melissa.
“Hey, Melissa, think you can tell Gary we’re running low on Gushers?”
“No can do, short stack. I doubt he’ll take his revenge on you, though.”
Janine blinks. “Oh,” she says, simply. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Gregory, left holding Janine’s coffee with Janine’s back turned to him, places the cup on the table and gives one last lingering look to the back of Janine’s head. Janine does not notice. Or she pretends not to notice. Melissa’s been there. More often than not, you pretend. She watches Gregory sitting down next to Jacob, and Janine sitting down next to no one.
When Barbara takes her place next to Melissa, Melissa’s too distracted watching Janine drinking her coffee alone to notice the coffee that’s been placed in front of her. It takes Barbara clearing her throat for Melissa to turn around, and be greeted by Barbara’s raised eyebrow.
“What?” she asks. Then she notices the coffee. Barbara is holding the same kind of cup, and Melissa knows that inside there is a drink so sweet she would never call it coffee, no matter how every local barista is sure that Barbara Howard drinks her coffee black without any sugar.
“It doesn’t usually take you this long to spot a coffee cup.”
Melissa rolls her eyes. “Thank you,” she says before even sipping the drink. Knows whatever’s inside is going to be just the thing she wants, made just the way she likes. She wraps her fingers around the warm cardboard and holds it. They’re well into January and the weather is unrelenting. Barbara reaches over, fixes Melissa’s green scarf in place. Her hand lingers there even after the wool is well-secured. Melissa raises her coffee and forces Barbara to let go.
When she turns back to Janine, she notices Janine’s looking at her the same way she’s been looking at Janine. And Melissa knows. She just wishes Janine would look at her not for an example, but for a warning.
*
The teacher’s lounge could be as big as Texas and Barbara would still find herself sitting next to Melissa, hips almost touching, leaning in to show her something on her phone or check over each other’s grading. The way Melissa’s hand would find itself on the back of Barbara’s chair, or –on the less and less rare occasion–on Barbara’s back or shoulder was something that Barbara had poured too much thought into. Had wondered, for years, if it meant something akin to the aching she would feel in her chest every time that happened. Divorced her husband and had yet to find the courage to ask Melissa that question, somehow, though the reasoning for her divorce had nothing and everything to do with that hand on the back of her chair. That hip nearly touching hers. That head leaning closer to see what Barbara was talking about. That throaty laughter when Barbara would tell a good joke, those twinkling eyes when Barbara gave her that scarf she’s wearing, the crack in that voice when Barbara said it suited her and the words nearly tumbling off Barbara’s lips when Melissa inhaled the perfume that Barbara had sprayed over the wool.
I love you. I have loved you for so long, Melissa. Please.
She has gotten tangled in her own fears, has made herself believe that despite her bone-deep knowledge of the meaning behind their gestures, behind their silences, behind their roundabout conversations, she would be risking something by saying these words. Friendship, perhaps. Or maybe something more. They haven’t been simply friends for long enough that Barbara cannot pretend she’s terrified of losing Melissa in this way. What she is terrified of she cannot admit–a reciprocation, a failure, a mistake, waking up to something going so terribly wrong, feeling so terribly wrong, after she spent a lifetime wanting it. Building up to it. It is, perhaps, better to leave it as it is: a liminal space of possibilities, the brush of a hand, the scent of perfume lingering in the air. They’ve known this. This is safe.
“Hey,” Melissa bumps her shoulder against hers, nodding her chin toward the other side of the lounge. It’s lunchtime but the room is quiet, and as Barbara follows Melissa’s direction she understands why. Janine and Gregory are sitting on the couch, leaning over a stack of papers, holding red pens. Their position is so familiar to Barbara that she almost experiences a deja-vu: the quiet and comfortable manner with which Gregory corrects something on Janine’s side of the stack; the little frown on Janine’s face that speaks of affection rather than displeasure; their shoulders touching-not-touching and their voices low so even Barbara and Melissa barely hear them. They don’t notice Barbara and Melissa watching, which is the biggest tell of all. Everybody’s got a tell, Melissa told her: yours is in your hands. You play with your wedding ring when you lie.
They were tipsy on wine in Melissa’s house and Melissa got up immediately after saying that, refilled her glass and picked a spot further away from Barbara on the carpeted floor. They were younger. They could have done something then. They didn’t, of course. Looking at Gregory and Janine in this moment is like remembering that. And Lord, does Barbara understand.
Someone, or something, always in the way. To their relief. To their utter pain. Some reasonable excuse. Some invisible line. A perfect out. A fear of commitment. A text from a girlfriend. A marriage to a good man. God. Strongly held morals. A third or fourth plate at a Christmas dinner that used to be set for only two. An almost kiss in the flurrying snow. Longing glances across a crowded room. Unholy words on the tips of reticent tongues. Maybe in a different lifetime. Perhaps in a better tomorrow.
Are the cameras looking?
Melissa’s smile is a tired one, but not a sad one. Barbara wants so badly to reach and run her thumb over her cheek, lean into the space that’s barely between them–physically; there are lightyears separating her way to kissing Melissa. Gregory and Janine could so very easily be them in that very moment, except Barbara knows there aren’t over twenty years of weight for them to carry. It could be easier for them. It could just as easily become just as complicated.
“You have something…” Melissa says, gently wipes an eyelash off the corner of Barbara’s eye. “Here,” she offers it to her.
“Sorry,” they hear Gregory say, then, and turn to watch the young teachers once more. Gregory’s shoulder is flush against Janine’s, and Janine is shifting away from it. “Let me…” he starts, moving up the couch. Something breaks open in Barbara’s chest when she sees the lightyears coming in between them, too. Melissa stiffens next to her, makes a small noise of disappointment that tells Barbara everything she needs to know.
Are the cameras looking?
“I’m gonna head to class,” Janine says. Her smile is tired, and also sad. “Thanks for the help.”
“Yeah, sure, anytime,” Gregory replies, rubbing the back of his neck. His smile is one that Barbara has seen far too many times before, Melissa watching her walk away far too many times before.
He doesn’t pay them any heed when leaving the lounge too. They sit in silence, Melissa playing with the food remaining in her Tupperware and Barbara watching her own nervous hands.
“They’re wasting time,” Melissa says, forcing Barbara’s eyes upward. Melissa’s not meeting her gaze.
“They have time,” Barbara tries to argue, to subdue the conversation, afraid, suddenly, that they might broach a subject that is too close for comfort, though they have broached that kind of subject many times before–having conversations that revolved around nothing and everything all at once. Except this is concrete, this is right in front of their faces, this is a mirroring of a day they have gone through. Again. And again. And again
Are the cameras looking?
“They’ll say that, and suddenly they’re sixty and wondering what’s wrong with their back.”
“You’re not sixty just yet, sweetheart.”
“But there’s a lot wrong with my back.”
Melissa meets her eyes, finally, and the world stops turning. And the world falls vacuum-silent. And the world presses down on Barbara’s shoulders and makes everything seem futile, useless, unimportant. If someone were to tell her to push a stone up a hill and she’d be free from this feeling once she gets to the top, she’d do it over and over and over again no matter how many times she’d fail. She understands. It’s not madness, it’s desperation.
Are the cameras looking?
“And what do you suggest we do about that?”
“Didn’t Ava send something about a cross-grade project?”
“Yes, with no punctuation whatsoever.”
“Nevermind that. I think you know what I’m thinking.”
And Barbara does. Because it’s Melissa, and she always knows what she’s thinking. She might not play poker but Melissa’s tell is a simple one: her heart on her sleeve, no matter how much others fail to see it. Barbara has never missed its beating pulse. Fluent in its cadence, Barbara never fails to understand what it wants.
( And yet. )
“You want to meddle,” she says, smiling slightly.
Melissa shrugs. “Just a little dinner.”
“You, me, and the kids?”
“Never hurt anyone.”
Barbara clicks her tongue. “You know I could never say no to a little romance.”
Melissa laughs, shakes her head. “You are the definition of hopeless.”
They lock eyes, linger there, smiles slowly fading. Clear their throat. Look away.
Are the cameras looking?
“I’ll take Mr. Eddie,” Barbara declares.
“I’ll take Janine.”
When the bell rings, Melissa rises first, hand on the back of Barbara’s chair. “Have a good one, Barb,” Melissa says.
“I’ll see you,” Barbara replies, watching her walk away, her fingers coming to rub at the familiar spot on her hand that’s been bare for a long time now. She still has the same tell.
*
When Gregory Eddie finally locks his classroom up for the evening, he briefly rests his head against the cool surface of the door, his fingers tensed around the scratched handle. It’s been a long day.
Or, maybe, more accurately still, it’s the same day that he’s been having for the last few months now, trying to work up the nerve to just do it, rip the bandaid off, and tell Janine how he really feels. Though it was merely a fantasy at first—a distant daydream that he had initially tried to subsume along with the rest—somewhere along the way it became as tangible of a desire to him as his lifelong ambition of becoming a principal.
He’s had it all meticulously planned out for the last six weeks at least, neatly organized in the ledger of his mind.
Grab her hand, Gregory Eddie, and take her to some secluded spot in the school: the parking lot, maybe, or the snow-dusted roof. The tiny slip of a hall between their classrooms. The lounge when no one else is there.
Start off with the emphatic recognition of her boundaries.
He perfectly understands if she still doesn’t want to date right now.
Or if she doesn’t feel the same way about him that he does about her.
She means a lot to him; he’d never do anything to jeopardize their relationship.
But his own truth is this.
I don’t want to just be friends anymore, Janine.
I love you.
But in the same way that his color-coded agendas and meticulously itemized spreadsheets can occasionally come to naught, this best laid plan has been delayed everyday for some reason or another too—only a few of which are even remotely reasonable. His kids are acting up. Ava is playing something explicit over the intercom again. His tie is inappropriately creased. It’s not sunny enough outside. It’s far too cold for a heartfelt love confession. He’s out of his favorite cologne.
He’s desperately afraid that his words are insufficient—as they so often are and perhaps have always been. Past girlfriends of his have told him that he can come across as distant at times.
A little cold even.
And he’s never been able to wrap his stilted tongue around the correct order of words to explain that he’s just always been in his own head, and he sometimes doesn’t realize this when he’s around other people—thinks he’s just being normal, if a little quiet, but quiet has always been his normal. Other times, though, he’s felt like an outsider with his fingers splayed against the glass, separated from his peers because he doesn’t emote like they do. He doesn’t have their vivacity, their gift for being at ease with others, at home in a lively crowd, capable of articulating the words that collect in his mouth like snow.
So he convinces himself that he’ll tell Janine the next day when he’s stopped Ava from corrupting the next generation or bought more cologne or re-ironed all of his ties. He’ll tell her when the sun is shining, and the temperature is a charmingly moderate seventy-one degrees. He’ll wait until the time is right, when all the stars have perfectly arranged themselves into a line.
But really, this is all just a pretense for the fact that he’s waiting for the precise moment when he’s sure that his confession will sound sincere and not like a memo he has robotically memorized from the Notes app on his phone. As the days have passed by him, marching onwards in dutiful configuration, he’s grown increasingly unsure if there will ever be such a profound alignment of things that will have to happen that will suddenly make him brave.
Today, though, he almost believed that he was going to be proven otherwise.
When they were grading together today in the teacher’s lounge, sitting side-by-side on that damn, lumpy couch, Gregory could have mathematically calculated the closeness of their limbs in relationship to each other, her hip almost touching his outer thigh, their elbows nearly brushing, their hands. If it wasn’t for the fact that Melissa and Barbara—and three camerapeople aside—were also in the lounge, maybe he would have finally done it. Maybe he would have blurted his secret out, right then and there, the moment that their wrists accidentally crossed when they were both reaching for their piles, but surveillance made wary statues of them both.
Janine kept looking over at Barbara and Melissa, visibly discomfited to be sitting so close to Gregory with her two mentors in the room. He could see the anxiety in her eyes: Were they looking at them? Judging? Did they care? Gregory, meanwhile, knew the two senior teachers would mosey back to their classrooms sooner or later, but the documentarians were omnipresent, intruding upon every personal moment, and however dry his mouth was at Janine’s proximity, his sense of discipline was greater.
He chickened out again, and his stomach painfully twisted when she inevitably moved away.
Idiot.
He rattles the handle he is currently holding, clenching it tightly.
Coward.
Unfailingly and always.
But not particularly keen on sitting with his self-abasing thoughts for too long, he inhales once, the gesture sticking between his ribs like a sharp knife, and forces himself to get on with his life; there’s no use in wallowing about something he doesn’t have the courage to fix. And so, with a modicum of effort, the mechanical laboring of all his long and tired limbs, he adjusts the strap of his bag on his shoulder and walks past Janine’s closed door, meticulous not to spare it a glance longer than is reasonably allowed. The soles of his shoes click reliably against the scuffed tiles. The dimmed fluorescent lights cast an eerie glow across an empty hall.
And the liminality of the place strangely bothers him, the lack of life in a building usually teeming with it; he feels the hollowness of it settle in his bones along with all the other absences that are currently haunting him.
He has no family in Philly.
And just a couple of friends.
A succession of nice but never serious relationships.
A colleague he almost kissed last year in the flurrying snow.
Didn’t, though.
Because there had been a reasonable excuse then too—a perfect out—a girlfriend whom he broke up with less than a week later only to find out that Janine was apparently seeing Maurice, his old roommate.
And so Gregory dated Ciara, a frequent visitor at his favorite juice bar, while Janine eventually figured out Maurice; he was a good friend but a shitty partner. A veritable fuckboy, incapable of settling long enough to ever treat a girlfriend well. And Ciara abruptly broke it off with him after only a few months, but by then, Janine was telling everyone in the teacher’s lounge that she was done dating for a while.
“Finished, finito,” she’d emphasized, a stubborn divot in her black brow. “I’m dedicating the rest of the year to working on myself.”
“Good for you,” Melissa had snorted between hefty bites of her risotto. “Dating’s the worst. So many feelings you gotta talk about. And you’re constantly shaving your damn legs.”
“Melissa,” Barbara had immediately chided, elbowing her on the arm.
“What?”
“Don’t be a cynic.”
“I’m not. I’m just sayin’—“ But he had tuned their familiar bickering out, fully incapable of caring when his mind was full of Janine.
She hadn’t looked at him when she said what she did, which he had understood to be a covert message unto its own.
We’re not going there.
We can’t.
They’ve been perfectly cordial to each other since then, observing all their normal traditions of being without so much as a pause, carrying on as though—for all intents and purposes—they’re the closest work friends in the world.
But in the semi-darkness, in the cold emptiness of this deserted hall, where no one can see him, where he is beyond the cameras, beyond public suspicion, he feels this particular lie settle like dust in his mouth.
He sees Janine almost every day.
She is an absence nonetheless, a cavity nearly always standing by his side.
And so, despite her insistence that she’s done with dating, Gregory’s been making plans anyway and thinking about confessing them. But perhaps he’s just been fooling himself into thinking that an almost kiss outside a hookah bar a year ago had meant more than it really had.
Maybe it’d simply been the result of two lonely ships crossing dark waters at just the right time.
Coincidence, a once in a lifetime occurrence—nothing more and nothing less.
The epiphany settles in him about as comfortably as a toothache.
So maybe that’s why he decides to stop by Barbara’s classroom on the way out, taking the half-open door as an invitation—a saving grace from having to think about his troubles for at least the five minutes he’ll probably spend idly chatting with the kindergarten teacher about the weather. When he peers inside, he sees that Barbara is sitting at her desk, readers delicately perched on the tip of her nose, silently mouthing words to herself as she carefully annotates a rather meager packet. He recognizes it to be the school board’s (somewhat half-assed) amendments to safety protocols after a sixth grader pulled the fire alarm last week, causing the whole school to needlessly evacuate when there was at least an inch of snow on the ground.
It’d been a shitshow to say the least.
Ava had been one of the first to leg out of the double doors, impressively fast in her three-inch Gucci heels.
(“Y’all have got to move!!” She’d called behind her. “This ain’t a drill!”)
Jacob, meanwhile, had nearly been trampled by his own kids.
( “Nearly is the imperative word,” he’d smirked proudly when he was relaying the story in the lounge the next day. “I got on top of my desk in time.”)
Gregory smiles slightly at Barbara’s characteristic studiousness; of course she’s marking it up, studying it like it’s a holy text. She’s Mrs. Howard after all , and she never leaves an i undotted nor a t uncrossed, not one damn stone unturned.
He knuckles the door softly to attract her attention—doesn’t want to scare her—and she glances up from her document readily, leaning back in her chair with a tired sigh, briefly rolling her neck. But when she sees that it's him, her exhaustion seems to shed from the kindergarten teacher like an old skin, her darkly framed eyes widening in recognition and delight.
“Why if it isn’t Mr. Eddie,” she muses in a tone of pleasant surprise. “I’m glad that you’re here—come on in.”
She neatly places her glasses on top of her desk and gestures to him with one expertly crooked finger; he’s powerfully reminded of his own momma—assuredly the sweetest woman he knows—but much like Barbara, she has an indefinable air of authority emanating from her. When Momma says come, working her index finger in just the same way, he has no choice but to ask how far.
“I was going to come track you down tomorrow anyway,” she continues as he dutifully walks over. “Though I must admit, I’m a little surprised that you’re still here. It’s, what—?” She glances at the analog clock ticking away on the wall. “Nearly five? And so close to the weekend too… surely you don’t have that much grading left… do you?”
There’s something about the way that she lingers on this last sentence that makes Gregory suspect—and not for the first time since he’s met Barbara a little over two years ago now—that she can read minds. He represses a sudden urge to avert his eyes. While he stakes far less on her opinion than Janine does, he isn’t entirely immune to the effect that Barbara Howard seems to have on most people.
It’s not hard to want to earn her respect—or, at the very least, to be clear where one stands with the unspoken matriarch of the school. Ava may be the principal, but in the implicit hierarchy of staff respectability, Barbara sits atop of them all.
Gregory thinks about how she and Melissa had also been in the lounge earlier, privy to every microgesture that had passed between himself and Janine. He had thoroughly assumed that neither of the older teachers had cared—wrapped up in their own two-person world as they usually were—but maybe Janine’s anxieties hadn’t been unfounded.
Maybe it had been a miscalculation on his part to ever think that Barbara Howard wasn’t paying attention.
“Uh,” he hesitates, shrugging a hand across the back of his neck, “nah. Just finished up the rest of their spelling tests, and I’ll run through their reading comp quizzes sometime tomorrow. ‘Bout to leave here and head to the gym...”
Exercising is the last thing on his mind, but he rationalizes that the exertion might be an efficient diversion.
Distraction from the strange sadness.
Anesthesia.
“Good,” she nods approvingly, offering him a warm smile. “You deserve a break.”
And he fleetingly convinces himself that he had imagined the other teacher’s shift in tone—her quiet and meaningful gravitas—though this assumption is readily upended when his curiosity gets the better of him.
“So what were you going to track me down for?” He asks, gently tilting his head. He figures it has to be important if she would have willingly sought him out; it’s usually the other way around with them—him needing advice from an adult who is adultier than him and Barbara usually being the first person he turns to.
“Am I in trouble, Mrs. Howard?” He adds, teasing dryly, because he thinks he and Barbara have finally gotten to a place in their relationship where they can do that, but his playfulness is quickly quelled by the way that the smile fades from his colleague’s darkly painted lips, by the unmistakable solemnity that replaces it, etching itself into every line of her carefully arranged face.
“No,” Barbara shakes her head slowly, with quiet deliberation. “But you will be soon if you don’t start being real with yourself, son.”
He can intuit—just from the way that she primly temples her hands on top of her desk—that this is certainly not going to be a conversation about grading.
But, of course, even when he was actually grading in the lounge today, it wasn’t about grading then either.
“And I’m not talking about school matters,” she continues in an even voice. Clinical, like the incision of a scalpel, and just as deep. “I am referring, of course, to Janine.”
His mouth is dry, his tongue, the pillar of his throat.
“What about her?” He barely gets out because the alternative is to confess, and he can’t do that. Not here. Not now. It’s too soon. He doesn't even know how to commit to a sweater choice, let alone a sentence that exposes the raw mess of his insides, all of the feelings he has long tried to shove beneath the proverbial bed. And now Momma is looking. She’s about to see—
“You love her,” Barbara enunciates it clearly and without mercy, but the darks of her eyes are softened, regarding him with a look that he fears to be pity. His father always says that pity is for women and for fools, and Gregory emphatically disagrees—detests everything his father stands for—but he’s as good at keeping Lionel Eddie’s voice out of his head as he is staying away from Barbara and Jacob’s garden. That tobacco-hardened growl is like a weed pushing through the concrete—invasive and ruinous, driving him damn insane.
“It’s not that simple.” He sounds petulant, even to his own ears. He doesn’t exactly know why he’s still being stubborn—why he can’t just say the words aloud even now—thoroughly found out by another. He supposes it’s his pride, mouthing off even at gunpoint, incapable of ever admitting defeat.
“Isn’t it, though?” The older woman presses, arching an expertly raised brow. “She’s single, and so are you, and you have a glorious—nay!— miraculous window to tell her how you really feel. Do you understand how rare it is that such an unfettered opportunity exists in this life? How many people would kill to have nothing standing in their way? Are you oblivious, Mr. Eddie? Surely not. I never took you to be the type.”
He feels like he’s ten again, sitting on a hardback pew, listening to one of Reverend Mordecai’s biweekly fire-and-brimstone sermons. How he’d instinctively felt the need to repent, even though the worst he had ever done was covertly swipe a ginger snap from his grandma’s secret stash every now and then.
“You’re not being fair, Barbara,” Gregory hears himself say precisely because he’s not ten. He’s twenty-eight and he doesn’t have to be preached at anymore, even if it’s by a respected colleague. “You’ve heard Janine in the lounge. She’s not interested in dating right now.”
He envisions her so clearly in his mind’s eye, head turned away from him, her message stunningly apparent.
She doesn’t want to date him.
When nothing is standing in their way, when such an unfettered opportunity exists, she has given him an unmistakable answer.
No.
(Perhaps another reason he hasn’t worked up the nerve to actually give her his defiant reply. Why bother if he already knows the foregone conclusion of the song?)
“And besides…” He croaks softly, lowering his gaze. “It’s not like that between us… we work better as friends.”
It’s a trite line, the kind of cliché that people only say in movies when the scriptwriter has clearly run out of meaningful things to say, but Gregory feels their pain. He has no other words that don’t require the impossible out of him.
That hardly demand his honesty.
We work better as friends is one hell of a lie precisely because it sounds practical enough to be the truth.
Gregory forces himself to look Barbara in the eye as he says it, suppressing a flinch when he immediately sees that her expression is nothing but tenderness for him, concern and good intentions and lovely, aching care.
Being seen still surprises him after all these years.
He’s so used to being counted among the landscape.
“I fear I may be overstepping,” she begins gently, and perhaps a little hesitantly, biting her lower lip, “if I haven’t already—but I don’t want you to wake up one day and realize that it’s too late, Gregory.”
And she makes a move as though to reach out to him, to touch his forearm, maybe his wrist, but there is too much distance between them—a whole desk in the way—and she temples both of her hands beneath her chin as he processes her carefully chosen words.
“Too late to tell her,” she goes on in a softer tone still, perhaps to make up for the conspicuous absence of her touch. “Too late to stop her from finding someone else—as she assuredly will. Too late to be good and kind to yourself, thinking it is your duty to be good and kind to others first.”
Such is the Christian way, Gregory automatically thinks to himself, having listened to countless sermons of self-abnegation in his youth and still remembering the rhetoric well.
It hardly surprises him that Barbara, a consummate Christian if he’s ever met one, knows the familiar phraseology too. What gets him, rather, is the pained nature of her voice, how it strains at the end, nearly stretches to the point of breaking—all to affirm the good doctrine.
If he didn’t know any better, he would say that the older teacher is clearly speaking from experience—that she had once been too late and too self-sacrificing, that she had once made a martyr out of herself and lost some once-in-a-lifetime love because of it.
He wonders if she’s talking about the husband she just so painfully divorced.
A partner of some thirty, maybe even forty years.
He has an inexplicable feeling—some instinctive gut check that he can’t exactly explain—that she’s not referring to him at all, and if it’s not the dissolution of her nearly lifelong marriage that she regrets, then what is?
But maybe the more pressing question is who?
“How do you know?” Gregory asks, too curious to stop himself, suddenly needing to know the answer, thinking it is pertinent to himself and his own life and its messy particulars. He works his thumb beneath the strap of his satchel and grips it tightly.
“Pardon?” Barbara’s elegant brow gathers above her eyes.
“When you’re in the thick of it, how do you know when it’s too late?” He clarifies, finally incapable, here at the last, of keeping the pleading note from his voice, but he supposes he is desperate. He has a three-step plan for telling Janine Teagues that he loves her, but it becomes more of a distant abstraction with each and every day that passes without him executing it.
It is the kindergarten teacher’s turn to glance away now, staring outside the window, where the honey-colored sky slants in through the blinds, lighting upon her face like a sad and golden kiss. Reddening at the edges—this horizon, this day, this setting sun—and it vaguely reminds him of something familiar.
Of what, though, he isn’t exactly sure.
“You just know,” she eventually says, so quietly that he has to lean forward to properly hear her, “when she’s less than three feet away and somehow further from you than ever before.”
It’s rather strange.
Odd even.
Gregory knows that Barbara is supposedly talking about Janine—and more specifically, about him and Janine together—but the she in that sentence, that heavily uttered syllable, had sounded so personal on her tongue.
Reverent even.
He allows it’s not entirely impossible that Barbara could be in love with Janine too… but he doesn’t think that’s what’s going on—as much as he wouldn’t blame her the other teacher for it.
In fact, as Barbara finally turns to face him again, peeling her wistful eyes away from that now scarlet drenched sky, it finally hits him where he’s seen that precise shade before.
In the teacher’s lounge, spiraling over the shoulders of one Melissa Schemmenti, who sits next to Barbara every single day.
He doesn’t need to know how many feet divide the space between them because Barbara just undoubtedly told him.
And he stares at her, with widened eyes, bowed beneath the weight of that revelation. He almost gapes at her, his chest tight, and suddenly remembers that on one of his very first days as a temp at Abbott Elementary, it had been Barbara who had told him, Say what you need to get what you want.
He had looked at Janine then, who was sitting on the other side of Melissa, a small smile on her lips as she watched all those kids laugh and play in the water.
But he now understands that Barbara, standing next to him, had surely been staring at Melissa, offering him sage advice that she has clearly never taken for herself.
After all, they’ve what—?
Been teaching next to each other for some twenty-odd years now? Twenty-five? Maybe even thirty? They’ve occupied the same spaces and made them their own.They’ve sat shoulder-to-shoulder at their island of a round table—less than three feet apart—grading papers and eating lunch, talking quietly amongst themselves in a shorthand that no one else really understands. He’s watched them with their heads put together, laughing at a dumb video on one of their phones. He’s rolled his eyes at their habitual squabbling, aware that it’s yet another love language between them. He’s fondly enjoyed the way that they think it’s their prerogative to mother the entire damn school. He’s understood them as an indivisible unit, a monolith unto their own.
And now he finally has the full picture.
Barbara plainly loves Melissa—loves her in a dramatic kind of fashion, loves her in the same way that he loves Janine—and it’s equally clear that she’s never, ever said it aloud to her.
Hell, Gregory doesn’t even think she’s realized that she just admitted it to him herself because the kindergarten teacher has moved past the moment, shuffling her papers again, and carrying on as though all is right with her world where she is in love with her best friend and content to never confess it. His audience with Barbara Howard has clearly concluded.
Mrs. Howard has picked up her red pen once more.
“But anyway,” she smiles at him tiredly, “listen, sweetheart, you, Janine, Melissa, and myself, this Saturday at Edelweiss, perhaps—you know, that lovely steakhouse a few blocks down from Kroger’s? We can discuss the project Ava has put us on. What do you say?”
He’s so shocked by this drastic change in conversation and still reeling from the topic that came before it, that he replies with the first thought that pops into his mind.
“Uh, so you mean, like a double date?” He asks, gulping thinly.
Gregory isn’t sure whether to laugh or to profusely apologize when Barbara startles at this clearly unexpected insinuation, accidentally swiping her glasses—where they had still been laying on the desk, to the floor.
“Oh, my,” she shakes her head vigorously. “Heavens no. For you and Janine, perhaps—indeed, do inform her that this is a date—but Melissa and I, we’re not, we could never—”
She prattles on and on, her cheeks rather dark with blush, and Gregory only grins at her.
He never thought he’d say this about the great Barbara Howard, but she is clearly whipped.
(That makes two of them.)