Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine: Stories by Kevin Wilson

Author:Kevin Wilson [Wilson, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary, Family Life, General
ISBN: 9780062450685
Google: phE9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-06T21:00:00+00:00

Sanders for a Night

She was late. It was twenty minutes since Greg’s class had let out for the day and Marta was just now pulling up to the school’s entrance. She saw her son sitting on the steps with the principal, Mrs. Chambers, instead of the teacher who usually ran the pickup program. He was staring straight ahead, his wide, blue eyes unblinking, his dark brown hair a tangled mess, as if he was wearing a bird’s nest on his head. It was the fifth time she had been late this fall and she knew that Mrs. Chambers was going to be upset. The teacher in charge of pickups had mentioned the issue of her lateness to Marta the last time it happened, and not nicely, either. “We have an after-school program, Mrs. Timbs,” she said, “but it costs extra. Perhaps you’d be interested?” She felt so chastised that she didn’t even remind the woman that, since the divorce in September, her name was now Mrs. Poltz. Or Ms. Poltz. It was hard to remember even for her. “I’ll be on time,” Marta had said then, “I promise.” Well, she was late again, and now Mrs. Chambers was leaning through the open window of the car. “We need to talk,” she said. Mrs. Chambers’s face was pale white, grimacing. She did not address Marta by any name, maiden or otherwise. This was not a good sign.

Greg waited in the car while Marta stood in the hallway of the school building. Mrs. Chambers had gone to get Greg’s teacher. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry again,” but Mrs. Chambers was already too far down the hallway to hear. Marta was going to be late getting back to the office. She had only started this job in June and they had been nice enough to let her defer her lunch hour every day in order to pick up Greg and take him home. Now she was going to have to stay longer at work to make up for the time she had missed. It was busy at the university right now, all the researchers in her department needing their grants to be prepared, forms that she still wasn’t sure she completely understood. She had spent most of this month scrambling to meet deadlines, trying to get everything turned in by the end of October. She had three days left and this was not helping. Nothing seemed to be helping. She had hoped that maybe, finally, things could, if not return to normal, become just a little easier. But now here was Greg’s teacher with Mrs. Chambers behind her, both of them saying the same thing. “We need to talk.”

But it turned out this talk was not about the late pickups. It was about Halloween. Greg’s third-grade teacher, a nice, very young woman just out of college named Ashley, sat in a chair beside Marta in Mrs. Chambers’s office while the principal sat behind her own desk.

“Have you and Greg discussed Halloween costumes?” Ashley asked her.

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