“I think I should alert the Pentagon,” Nate said to Jenny after morning recess a couple of hours later.
She laughed, the sound of it as light and airy as clouds skipping across the sky. He had always loved the sound of her laughter. There had been a lot of things he’d realized he’d missed when he came back home, but none caused the wrench of longing in his gut the way Jenny’s laughter did. “Why do you say that?”
“You’ve got this classroom running better than a lot of platoons. I’ve never seen such organization, especially with kids.”
She pulled open the door to her classroom and waved the children inside. Nate stayed on the opposite side of the stoop, providing crowd control. “You should see me the first day. It’s all chaos until I get to know the kids and they get to know me.”
“I bet you have a schedule and a routine all set before the first bell rings on opening day. If I remember right, you weren’t the type to like chaos for very long.”
The last child skipped across the threshold, followed by Nate. Jenny swung the door shut and latched it firmly. “No, I didn’t.” Her voice had dropped into a softer, almost melancholy range.
Jenny’s childhood, he knew, had been a topsy-turvy one. She’d never talked about it much, but it had been clear her flighty mother and absent father had made her young life unpredictable. Throughout their courtship, she’d called Nate her “rock,” the one support system she could count on. With him, Jenny had seemed to let loose, live more for the moment, as if she trusted him to be there when she needed to come back to reality.
Inevitably, though, she’d always rein herself back in, focusing on work or homework or whatever else was more important then, as if she’d suddenly realized the consequences of being too spontaneous. They’d had fun when they’d dated, most of the time, when Jenny had let down her hair and really let him into her heart and her world.
He remembered the fights, the days when it seemed there was no way to repair the damage between himself and Jenny, but he also remembered so much more. Laughter over nothing at all. Hugs on the porch. Kisses sneaked behind the shed. Teasing, torturous touches in the lake during summer camp.
“Jenny, I—”
She turned to him, her emerald eyes wide. Waiting. “Yes?”
Save for a slight maturity in her face and a lightening in her hair, Jenny Wright was the same woman he remembered. Her laughter, her smile, her eyes. All of it exactly the same, as if the past ten years had passed in a blink.
But he was different. And he’d be fooling himself if he thought she’d want anything but the old Nate, the strong, can-do-anything man he’d been. That was the man she had loved, not the shell of a used-up soldier he’d become. “Never mind.”
“Don’t do that. You were about to say something. Tell me.”
He looked past her, into the bright and sunny classroom that so captured Jenny’s personality in the vibrant wall hangings and the sunflowers decorating the bulletin boards. “I…I think Jimmy is trying to feed Lindsay a worm.”
“Oh, God, not again,” she muttered and spun away.
Within thirty seconds, she had the offensive invertebrate back outside, Lindsay calmed and Jimmy seated at a desk in the hall. “Exile worked well with Napoleon,” Jenny explained, joining Nate at the back of the room. “And it works well with Jimmy Brooks, too.”
“You’re a genius.”
“Nah, I just have a system that works for me. All teachers do.” She glanced at her watch, then stepped away from him, clapped her hands and two dozen heads popped to attention. “Story time, children. Everyone grab a mat and take a seat on the floor. Today, we’ll read together instead of having a silent reading period.”
A few minutes of scrambling, and then the class had assembled in a circle on the floor around a small rocking chair. Jenny grabbed a book off the shelf and pressed it into Nate’s hands. “Here you go.”
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Wear it.” She grinned. “No. Read to them.”
“Me?”
“That’s what you’re here for.” She leaned closer and the scent of sandalwood wafted up to greet him. In the bottom of his foot locker was a box of letters that held that very scent, faint now after all these years, but still discernible if he placed them very, very close to his face.
How many times had he done that in those lonely years in the marines? Those days after he’d lost her, when the only thing he’d had was a few sheets of sandalwood-scented stationery? Too many times, he knew.
He jerked himself back to the present when he saw her staring at him. “What’d you say?”
“I said, go read to them before they start a riot in the circle.” She gestured to the group of kids, already starting to argue and tease each other.
He grinned. “Your wish is my command.”
Jenny smiled back. “Now why can’t all men say that more often?”
“Because we rarely mean it.” He caught her chuckle as he made his way through the crowd of children, who parted like the Red Sea to make room for him and his cane to wriggle through. Once he was settled in the chair, he cracked open the story and began to read.
At first, his voice droned in a monotone, the cadenced speech pattern he’d developed after so many years in the military. But then, as the pages passed and the story began to grow more interesting, Nate slipped into the voices of the characters, adding inflections to the old man, high pitches to the shrieking neighbor woman and a deep baritone for the firefighter who all starred in the tale.
The children stopped squirming and talking. They perched their elbows on their knees and leaned forward, ears pitched toward the sound of his voice. When he reached the last page, several of them let out cries of disappointment.
“Let’s thank Mr. Dole for his spirited reading debut,” Jenny said, stepping into the circle.
The applause that encircled him could have been coming from Carnegie Hall. Nate shut the book. “It was fun.”
“I told you so,” she whispered, taking the novel from him and replacing it on the shelf. “You always were a ham.”
The children got to their feet, replacing their carpeted mats in the pile and heading back to their seats. Jenny grabbed a stack of worksheets off her desk and handed them out, directing the class to write a short paragraph on the story and draw a picture of their favorite character.
Nate came up beside her. “I was not a ham,” he said.
Jenny laid the extra sheets on her desk and quirked a brow at him. “Who starred in every production put on by the Mercy Elementary Players?”
He chuckled. “I don’t think playing the lead in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown qualifies me for Oscar status.”
“You loved it. Admit it. I’m surprised you didn’t go into acting.”
He
