by here without warning, and strolling around to look in on our classrooms while we’re working.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Betty Rickart said indignantly. “Now, why would they want to do something like that?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lucia said, her cheeks coloring briefly. “They want to see if they can catch us making mistakes. You all know how gossip travels in this town. If they can convince people we’re not doing a good job, or that some of us can’t handle our students, they’ll have no problem getting enough votes against us when they hold their plebiscite.”
Jim glanced in sympathy at the circle of worried faces around the room. If Gloria Wall succeeded in her attempt to close the school, a lot of these people would be thrown out of work and forced to leave the town where some of them had lived all their lives.
“Well, folks, we have nothing to worry about,” Clyde said heartily from the doorway. “We’re all good teachers, so I reckon none of the board members will find anything wrong when they drop in on our classrooms. Will they?”
“I certainly hope they won’t,” Lucia said from her seat at the front of the room.
As she spoke, she gave Jim a glance of such pointed significance that he was startled again, and a little wary. Her words had been for everybody, but it was almost as if she’d issued a specific warning to him alone, letting him know he was on probation and she expected him to toe the line.
He met her eyes steadily. After a brief moment of tension, she was the first to look away, down at the notes on her desk. For the remainder of the meeting, she didn’t glance at him again.
IN THE EARLY EVENING, Lucia sat upstairs on the cushioned dormer seat in her living room, gazing down at the shady backyard.
June was baby-sitting for her niece, Sally Carlyle, who went bowling on Tuesday evenings. The landlady sat on a bench beside her garden, with a length of blue knitting in her lap, while Sally’s two children played on the grass nearby.
The older boy was almost three, a sturdy red-cheeked cherub who ran around shouting and chasing after a ball with Duke, June’s old spaniel. A fat baby sat on a blanket gnawing the head of a yellow rubber duck and staring at the dog with round, solemn eyes.
While Lucia watched, June leaned over casually and drew the baby onto her lap, cuddled him for a moment and reached inside his plaid overalls to check the diaper. Then she kissed him and placed him back on the blanket where he resumed his contemplation of his brother and the big dog. The much-chewed duck was still gripped in his chubby hand, but for the moment he seemed to have forgotten it.
Lucia touched the waistband of her khaki shorts and felt a warm, melting trickle of love.
“Hello,” she whispered. “Are you really in there? And are you a boy or girl?”
Outside, the setting sun glimmered through the branches of the oak tree as if it had caught and tangled among the leaves. Golden fingers of light caressed June’s hair and the bright curls of the two children.
In a stone birdbath near the lilac hedge, a robin perched at the edge of the bowl. He preened and ruffled his feathers daintily, then bent to dip a wing in the brimming water. The older boy stopped running to gaze at the bird, his thumb jammed thoughtfully in his mouth.
This was all like some kind of waking dream, Lucia thought, watching the two children.
She couldn’t possibly be having a baby. Not now, when the school board was planning to launch its scrutiny of the school, and so many people depended on her for their jobs. And all because of a fleeting encounter with a virtual stranger who meant nothing at all to her.…
Maybe the test had been wrong, and none of it would happen after all.
But in spite of the wishful thinking, Lucia knew that her pregnancy was real. This baby existed. In fact, though infinitely tiny, it was every bit as much a reality as that fat little fellow down on the blanket in his plaid overalls, gnawing on a plastic duck.
And Lucia already loved her baby more passionately than she’d ever loved another person in all her life.
“We’ll get through this,” she whispered to the unseen presence within her. “I still don’t know how it’s all going to work, darling, but somehow we’ll manage.”
Lucia glanced out the window again, stroking her abdomen gently.
“Maybe if everything else is going just perfectly, and they can’t find a single thing wrong at our school except that the principal happens to be pregnant and there’s no father in sight—”
She stopped abruptly, tensing as Jim Whitley came through the back gate with his dog, strolled up the path and paused to say something to June, who set her knitting aside to greet the new tenant.
He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and faded denim shorts. Even from this distance, Lucia could see how the thick dusting of hair on his powerful legs glistened warmly in the dying light. His bare arms looked brawny and muscular under the fabric of the shirt.
He’d just moved into the house, but already his presence seemed to dominate everything. Though Lucia hadn’t spoken more than a few words to the man since he’d arrived, she was painfully conscious of Jim Whitley in the rooms just below hers. Even worse, she was dismayed by a warm tingle of excitement when she pictured him listening to her footsteps, the sound of her shower, the creaking of the wooden floorboards as she got into bed.
Nothing separated them, actually, but some old timbers and a few feet of space. The man’s personality was so powerful that Lucia felt his nearness in every cell of her body.
In the yard below, he gave June a questioning glance and said something. At her reply he crossed the grass and bent to lift the baby in his arms, holding him close.
June laughed as the tall man kissed the little boy’s cheek, then held him aloft and nuzzled his fat stomach while the baby kicked and squealed with delight.
Jim walked back to the bench, still carrying the baby, and settled next to June with the child in his arms and his long tanned legs extended on the path. The two adults talked casually as Jim cuddled the little boy and watched the older child run and play with the two spaniels.
Something about the scene below brought a painful lump to Lucia’s throat.
The four of them looked so peaceful and surreal in the fading light, like a misty image from some sweet, half-forgotten dream. And Jim’s arms were strong and brown against the baby’s fragile bare shoulders. He looked powerful and protective, as if nothing bad could happen to a child as long as this man was nearby. For no reason at all, Lucia found herself crying. She wasn’t even aware of the tears until she felt them running down her cheeks.
To her alarm, she saw Jim glance up briefly at the window where she sat. There was no way he could see her behind the heavy chintz drapes, but still she drew back hastily and huddled against the wall, dashing a hand across her streaming eyes.
When she peered out again, she saw Jim as he stood up to kiss the baby again, hand him to June and come toward the back door. He paused by the rose trellis and called something to the landlady, then vanished inside the house, leaving his dog out in the yard.
Lucia turned from the window and looked around at her snug little apartment, thinking she should get up and tackle
