dawn, whistling. Whistling! It confirmed that he was not the least distressed that she had canceled the date. The exact opposite, in fact.
He was very punctual, and Connor Benson showed up just as her students were swarming out the door of her classroom. He looked like a ship plowing through the sea of bright blue uniforms. Luigi Caravetti, who always had too much energy, was walking backward, catcalling at one of the girls.
Connor sidestepped him easily, but at that very moment, Luigi swung around and smashed into him.
Connor barely moved, but Luigi fell down. With absolute ease, Connor went down on his haunches, helped the little boy up, picked up the homework Luigi wouldn’t do anyway and handed it back to him. Luigi said something to him and then wound up and kicked Connor in the shin and ran off before Isabella could reprimand him.
Rubbing his shin, he turned to her and grinned ruefully.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “Luigi is a bit of a handful. What did he say to you?”
“I don’t know. He said it in Italian. I’m beginning to pick up a few phrases, so I think he told me to watch were I was going. And then he switched to English.”
“He doesn’t know any English.”
“Ah, well, there’s a universal word that all little boys—and most big ones—love to use.”
“Oh! I will speak to him tomorrow.”
“No, that’s okay. He kind of reminded me of me at that age. And if I was going to guess something about him? No dad in the picture.”
Again, Isabella was taken by Connor’s incredible powers of observation. “That’s true. In fact, his poor mother had to get a court order to keep the father away from them. He’s not, apparently, a very nice man. But still, Luigi is troubled about it all. Children are always troubled about difficulties between their parents.”
The last of the children clattered down the stairway to the main floor of the school, and they were cloaked in sudden silence. Then Connor Benson was in her classroom.
“So,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels, “this is your world.”
“Ninety-nine percent boring,” she told him. “One percent all hell breaking loose.”
Connor gave her an odd look that she interpreted as you don’t have a clue what all hell breaking loose looks like. But then he shrugged it off, as if he had given himself a mental order to lighten up. “I’m going to guess that one percent is largely your little Luigi.”
“You would be guessing right.”
“Nobody asked me what I was doing here when I came in,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“When I came in and asked for your classroom, no one at the office asked me what I wanted or what I was doing at the school. They didn’t even ask to see identification.”
“Obviously we are in need of a security expert!” she said brightly, but he didn’t seem amused. She became more serious. “We haven’t experienced the kinds of problems here that you have in America.”
Did he mutter yet under his breath? He removed his hands from his pockets and turned away from her and wandered around her classroom. At first she thought he was looking at drawings and pictures, and she was pleased that he was curious about her world. But then Isabella realized that Connor actually seemed to be looking for something else. She was not sure what.
He stood at the front, taking note of both the doors into the room. Then she saw him go to the windows, open the lock on one. He slid the window open and leaned out, looking at the ground.
He came to the table at the back, where she had the project laid out. He seemed faintly uneasy, but he lifted a sun with the hole in the center and put his head through it, attached the elastic around his chin.
She had planned to be so reserved, professional, accepting his help as a volunteer, but nothing more. Instead, she giggled at the picture this big self-assured man made with his face poking through a hole in a cardboard sunshine. The wall came tumbling down as she joined him at the art table at the back of the room.
How could he wear that silly thing with such aplomb? That’s what confidence did, she supposed. “Boys are sunshine,” she said.
“And girls?”
She picked up a pink flower and put her head through the center of it and attached the elastic. “Girls are flowers.”
He smiled at her, but she still thought she detected faint uneasiness in him. Well, was that so unusual? Many men seemed uneasy in classrooms. The furniture was all in miniature, after all. The spaces were too tiny for most men, and Connor was even larger than most men.
“These are done,” Isabella said, resting her hand on one stack, “but we have seven sunshines remaining to cut out and thirteen flowers. The children drew their own, but the cutting part can be quite difficult for little hands. The cardboard is a bit thick.” She gave him a pair of scissors.
He sank into one of the little chairs. She actually wondered if it would break under his weight.
“That doesn’t look very comfortable.”
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