Coming
This Weekend

MONDAY BEFORE FIRST · OCT. 27, 1986 · 7:38 A.M. · TEN MINUTES

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LAURA SET HER PURSE on the desk. Monday came quick having spent most of Sunday grading essays.

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There was a green form in her box she’d carried up from the office. She hadn’t read it. It could be read on her planning period when she could sit down. The top said something about textbook inventory. There was no way she hadn’t turned this in.

 

Dropping the form on her desk, she turned and stood at the window.

 

The front parking lot was filling up. Bobby McNeil got out of his truck parked across two spaces. That boy did that every morning and would graduate doing it.

 

She sipped her coffee.

 

She got about four minutes alone.

 

“Miz Sanderson?”

 

A boy peeked into her doorway. He looked like a sophomore, or a freshman. She knew the face but couldn’t put the name to him. She could ask but he’d be gone before she remembered.

 

“Sorry, my class isn’t open yet.”

 

“Yes ma’am. You seen Mrs. Gregory? My mama wants to know if I can make up a test I missed.”

 

“I haven’t. Have you gone down to her room?”

 

“No ma’am.” He didn’t leave. “I thought I’d ask her first.”

 

She stared at him. Her foot tapped.

 

He stood looking at her.

 

“Why don’t you go on down to her room and look for her.”

 

“Yes ma’am, I will.”

 

He left. She grabbed her cup and put it to her lips.

 

“Thank you, ma’am. I really need to find her so my mama don’t ground me.” His head poked back in through the door.

 

Laura stood there looking at him with her coffee.

 

A locker slammed in the hallway and somebody laughed at something.

 

The young boy left. It was way too early to deal with underclassmen. Her students were having a hard enough time on this month’s reading. The grades on the stack of essays on her desk made that a fact.

 

Looking at the clock, she had ten more minutes before the first bell. She pulled a compact out of her purse and looked in the small mirror. She sighed.

 

Hopefully this week would turn out uneventful.

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MONDAY FIRST PERIOD · OCT. 27, 1986 · 8:05 A.M. · THE PROLOGUE

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THE STUDENTS CAME IN LOUD and sat down slow.

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Randall Hayes was going on about a possum with Eddie Johnson, and they were two rows apart, so the whole room heard it whether they wanted it or not.

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“...the same possum. It’s the same one.”

 

“Ain’t no way it’s the same possum, Randall.”

 

“How do you know it ain’t, Eddie?”

 

“’Cause that possum’d be four years old.”

 

“So?”

 

“Possums don’t live four years, Randall.”

 

“This one did.”

 

Laura put her hand out flat, palm down. The room got silent. She grabbed the book off her stand, the one the seniors were reading.

 

“Prologue. Line one-eighteen.”

 

Books came open in spite of several moans. Somebody dragged their desk, then dragged it again.

 

She got chalk out of the tray and put 118 up on the board and underlined it. The chalk clicked when she set it on the tray under the board.

 

Sarah Mitchell raised her hand. “Mrs. Sanderson, is the test next Thursday or Friday?”

 

Laura grabbed the eraser and wiped a clean place on the board.

 

“Thursday.”

 

“Aww, Miss. You said Friday,” Barry Edwards said.

 

“Mr. Edwards, I said Thursday.” She tapped the board twice with the chalk. “It has been sitting up there since the fourteenth.”

 

“You said...”

 

“One-eighteen, Mr. Edwards.”

 

She had taught the Prologue for the last seven years, since becoming the English IV teacher. Every year went the same way. They got through the Knight fine. They liked the Prioress and her little dogs. Then somewhere in the middle of a list of people on a horse, in a language that was almost English, she lost them.

 

“Somebody tell me what the man telling this is doing that none of the rest of them are doing.”

 

Nothing.

 

Out in the hall a cart went by with a bad wheel.

 

“Anybody?”

 

Sarah Mitchell’s hand came halfway up and stopped.

 

Laura came off the front of the desk and started up the second row. That generally shook something loose. A boy two seats up found a place on the floor to look at. Somebody in the back was drawing.

 

“He’s watchin’,” she said. “He’s ridin’ along with the whole bunch of them and he’s the only one on that road not doin’ one blessed thing but lookin’ at

everybody else and writing it down.”

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A hand shot up, and the question came before Laura called on him. “Is that gonna be on the test?”

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Her hand went to her hip as she stared at him over the rim of her glasses. “Mr. Edwards.”

 

“I’m just askin’, Miss.”

 

“Yes, it could show up Thursday. You are responsible for all of it. But right now somebody besides Miss Mitchell needs to have an opinion about it.”

 

Eddie said something about the possum that she didn’t catch. Two students laughed.

 

She looked down at her dress. There was a white chalk mark at her hip.

 

She was three seats up the next row when Amber Brown closed a notebook. She had been carrying it all year, and she wrote in it small and fast and closed it whenever anybody came up on her.

 

“Miss Brown. Something to add?”

 

“No ma’am. Sarah covered it all.”

 

She hadn’t looked up.

 

Laura went on up the row. Behind her, Amber’s pen started moving again.

 

 

MONDAY PASSING PERIOD · OCT. 27, 1986 · 9:50 A.M. · THE FIRST TIME

 

SHE STOOD IN HER DOORWAY between second and third period greeting students as they came in or by.

 

The chalk on her hip was worse. She went at it with her thumb only to smear it more.

 

The students in second period exited.

 

“Worksheet’s Wednesday, Miss Foster. Wednesday.”

 

“Yes ma’am.”

 

“Mr. McNeil.”

 

He stopped in the doorway with his shoulders already going down.

 

“Your book is under that desk.”

 

He went back in and got it. He came out with it under his arm like that had been the plan.

 

“Walk,” she said, pointing at two students.

 

“Yes ma’am,” said a young boy.

 

“Hat, Mr. Hayes.”

 

Randall had it off before he was past her. Four steps down the hall it was back on. He did that every day of his life.

 

A sophomore came by with his shirttail hanging half out. She shook her head.

 

Eric Schmidt came past fast with two boys trailing right behind him.

 

“—Saturday. Everybody’s goin’.”

 

“Where at?”

 

“Baja.”

 

They were around the corner before the second one answered.

 

A girl pushed a folded office slip at her without slowing down. “Miz Nester said give you this.”

 

It was about the textbook inventory.

 

Across the hall the water fountain made the rattling sound it had been making since the second week of September. The custodian had ordered the part.

 

A freshman drank out of it anyway and came up wiping his chin.

 

The warning bell rang and the hall emptied. She looked down at her hip before turning to go into class.

 

 

MONDAY LUNCH · OCT. 27, 1986 · 12:10 P.M. · THE LOUNGE

 

WHOEVER MADE THE MORNING COFFEE left it too long on the burner. The whole room smelled like it. Mary Ellen Evans had brought leftover pound cake from a party on Sunday.

 

There was no reason on this earth for a pound cake on a Monday.

 

“You didn’t have to do that.”

 

“Are you kidding? You think I’m leaving that at the house to tempt me?” Mary Ellen cut a slice and handed it across without asking whether Laura wanted one. “Sit down. You’re making me tired.”

 

Laura sat and got the office slip out of her pocket and smoothed it flat on the table.

 

Rayburn Elliot was at the far end grading a stack of trig papers with a red pen like it had done something to him. Carolyn Harper’s feet rested on a chair. She flipped through a magazine avoiding the stack of papers in front of her. Coach Mabry came in and put money in the coke machine. It stuck again. He hit it with the side of his fist and his Dr Pepper rolled out. Laura could never find that spot. Coach turned and told the room the JV secondary couldn’t cover a folding chair. Nobody answered him. He left.

 

“So it looks like I got to get an alternator,” Sue Walker said to everyone at the table. “And I reminded Buddy that he’d told me in July it was the alternator.”

 

“So, was it?” Laura asked, taking a bite of cake. “Mmmm.”

 

“Well we put a battery in it. Twice.” She sat down. “Cost me about sixty-two dollars each time.”

 

“For a battery?” Mary Ellen asked.

 

“Yep and then it went and died on me Saturday at Stanley’s.”

 

“Oh no,” Laura said.

 

“Matt Garrett came out and jumped it off for me. He’s so sweet.” She sliced a piece of cake and put it on a plate. “And I still got to get it back to that shop Saturday.”

 

“Sue, you’re gonna take it to the same shop?” Mary Ellen asked, tapping Sue’s forearm.

 

“Well, who else is gonna fix it.”

 

“Take it over to Nagel’s,” Laura said.

 

“Nagel’s is higher,” Sue said, taking a sip of tea.

 

“Nagel’s is higher only one time, Sue. You’ve already paid twice what it’d cost to fix it right.” Laura’s fork scraped the plate and she made a face.

 

Mary Ellen reached over to Laura with a napkin to brush the chalk off her hip.

 

“Ughh, I know this is the first time I’ve worn this. Now I gotta send it to the cleaners.”

 

Carolyn Harper flipped a page from the stack she started grading. “Y’all hear about this Baja thing?”

 

“The what, Carol?” Sue asked.

 

“Baja. Fourth period in English, my juniors wouldn’t shut up about it.” Carol stopped on a page as she took a bite of her cake.

 

“That’s a race in Mexico,” Ray Elliot said, not looking up.

 

The women all turned to look at him.

 

“In Mexico?” Carol asked.

 

“That’s where the race is. It’s a bunch of cars that race across the Baja California peninsula. My brother-in-law watches it. Goes on for days.”

 

Carol scratched her head. “Well, these kids aren’t in Mexico. They’re in Edna.”

 

Laura and Mary Ellen both laughed.

 

The bell rang for students to come in and start heading to their fifth period. Ray mumbled something under his breath about the red pen. Everybody got up and threw away their paper plates.

 

Laura ate the last bite of the pound cake then got up.

 

The office slip was still lying on the table where she had smoothed it out, with a thumbprint of chalk on the corner. She grabbed it and headed to her classroom for fifth period.

 

 

MONDAY AFTERNOON · OCT. 27, 1986 · 3:45 P.M. · THE THIRD TIME

 

THE LAST BELL RANG and the building emptied in about four minutes.

 

By four, the hall was down to the custodian’s cart and somebody’s sneakers squeaking on the tile. Laura stayed till four-thirty like she did most days.

She started on the essays. The students were supposed to have written a page on the Prioress.

 

Barry Edwards spent his page telling her the woman had nice manners.

 

Sarah Mitchell gave her back everything she’d said about the Prioress in class and nothing else. Laura put And what do you think? in the margin and knew she’d get an apology for it after first period on Wednesday morning. It wouldn’t change a thing.

 

Eddie Johnson had written most of a page about the Miller, who they had not read.

 

She was two-thirds down the stack before she lost her place and had to go back through to see whether she’d done one already. She had. She’d written the same thing on it she wrote on all of them.

 

Two voices came up the hall.

 

“…your daddy’s truck?”

 

“He ain’t gonna care.”

 

“He’s gonna care.”

 

“He ain’t gonna know it. It’ll come off with a rag.”

 

“Man, I’m tellin’ you, for the Baja I’d put it on the back windshield.”

 

“You would?”

 

They were around the corner before she got up. Down at the end of the hall the cart started again.

 

She got two more done and put the rest in her bag. The green form went back on the corner of the desk where it had been all day.

 

Frank wouldn’t be home from football practice till six. Travis would probably get home around 6:30 from the Sheriff’s department if she was lucky. She sat in the car a minute trying to think what was in the freezer and couldn’t come up with one thing.