Annie's Bones by Howard Owen

Author:Howard Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579625580
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2018-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MAY 20

Betsy finds a cardboard box for Gray to use at the one stop he’s making before he heads south again, this time driving his own car.

“Are you sure you won’t need more boxes?” she asks. “I mean, damn, twenty years.”

He assures her that one box will suffice. He is not in a nostalgic mood.

He pulls into the parking lot at the college where he’s earned his salary for most of the past two decades. He called yesterday to make sure someone would be there to “escort” him to and from his desk.

The suburban campus is quiet. In what he considers the only smidgen of good news in the past week, final exams had concluded only four days before he and Annie Lineberger became news again. He was at least able to do right by his last two classes.

Among other items today, he has been told he can pick up the last paycheck he expects to see in quite some time.

The secretary, with whom he is on a first-name basis, comes around the desk and gives him a hug, then calls security.

Five minutes later, a guard who looks like he’s all of twenty comes through the door. He looks embarrassed, and familiar.

“Cody?”

The kid, a former high school football player with a thick neck who looks as if he’s gained ten pounds since he took the twentieth century American literature overview course Gray taught last fall, nods his head. He was one of the brighter students in the class.

“Gotta pay the bills,” Cody says. He explains that he took one course in the spring and “hopes to” get back into something like full-time student status in the fall. He’s working another job as well, as a bouncer. He mentions, almost as an afterthought, that he’s married now.

It has occurred to Gray more than once in his teaching career, and especially in the last decade or so, that he is not exactly preparing his students for twenty-first century life. Tuition at the community college isn’t that steep, but if the people in his classes plan to go on to a four-year school, they’ll all be taking out loans and, if they don’t major in something more useful than English, they might all be security guards eventually.

Cody apologizes twice while walking Gray back to his former office.

“I mean, I know some dudes who’ve messed up pretty bad, and it worked out,” he says.

Gray pats him on the arm. He appreciates the effort.

He has a hard time deciding what merits space in his cardboard box. There are the awards he got for allegedly being a good teacher. He also scoops up photos of Jimmy and Kaycee, of Kaycee and her kids, one of him and Betsy at the beach, and one of Josh in his Little League uniform. He picks up his Riverside Shakespeare and half a dozen other books of which he is particularly fond. He throws in the Rolodex that he still uses, computers be damned, although he wonders how many names on that list will be relevant to him in the future.

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