look on her face, as if what he’d said had surprised her. “As I said, Chelsea’s a blessed little girl.”
Alex cleared his throat. What was he supposed to say to that?
“But she’s also a very troubled girl,” she added.
“Can you blame her?” He shrugged and lowered his gaze to the floor. “As if it wasn’t bad enough that her dad’s a Marine rooting out insurgents in Iraq, now her mom’s in a Philadelphia cancer-treatment center undergoing intense chemotherapy.”
“She’s had an awful lot to deal with,” she agreed.
Dinah was studying him when he looked up at her again, suggesting that she was including him in her compassionate comment. Alex stiffened. He didn’t want her pity. Opening his guest bedrooms, juggling a few schedules and learning to make something edible out of frozen chicken breasts couldn’t come close to comparing to what Brandon and Chelsea had been facing.
“Everything’s going to be okay, though. Karla’s husband, Mike, is trying to get leave soon, and Karla will be just fine.” Even as he said it, Alex wondered which of them he was trying to convince.
“You just keep reassuring Chelsea of that at home, and I’ll do the same here at school.”
“How is she doing in school?” The question sounded strange in his ears. He’d always figured that one day he would attend parent-teacher conferences, but this wasn’t at all how he would have imagined it.
“That’s just the thing. Her grades are as high as they were last year.”
“Last year?”
“Our principal likes to loop second-and third-grade classes, so the children benefit from the stability of spending two years with the same teacher and the same classmates. Next year, Chelsea will go on to a new teacher, and I’ll start with a new group of second-graders.”
Stability. For the second time that day, Alex was thankful Chelsea had it at school if she couldn’t have it anywhere else. But it was also strange to realize that this Dinah Fraser, a stranger to him, probably knew the child he adored better than he did.
“So it’s not her grades?”
She shook her head. “She’s just so withdrawn and depressed. It’s as if all the sunshine has been lifted out of her eyes.”
That was it. As much as he’d known there was something different about Chelsea, he hadn’t been able to describe it. Dinah’s description had put his thoughts into words.
“In class, she’s so distracted that I had to move her desk away from the window to get her to pay attention,” she continued. “Still, I can barely get her to participate in classroom activities.”
Dinah planted her elbows on her desk and rested her chin in the V formed by her hands. “She used to make all this beautiful artwork, and now she doesn’t even want to color. She let herself be eliminated from the class Spelling Bee in the first round when I know full well she remembered that the e comes before the i in receive. You know, that i before e except after c…”
She stopped herself when she glanced up and caught him grinning at her. Shrugging, she smiled back at him. It was obvious that Miss Fraser loved teaching, and she was proving by this meeting that she loved her students, as well. If he’d ever had a teacher like her, maybe his own academic records would have leaned closer to the beginning of the alphabet instead of a few letters in.
He must have looked at her a little too long because Dinah blushed prettily and glanced away. Dinah Fraser might be used to getting more than her share of male attention, but that didn’t mean she was comfortable with it. She would have laughed if she’d realized that at least this time his thoughts weren’t on her appearance at all.
Still, he wondered how he could have lived in the area a whole year without ever meeting her.
“Fraser. I’ve heard that name before around here. Do you have relatives in Chestnut Grove?”
“Yes, there are a lot of us around.”
When she didn’t elaborate, Alex figured it was time to quit procrastinating. No matter how out of character it was for him, he needed to ask this woman for help.
“So…ah…what suggestions do you have for helping Chelsea outside of school?”
“Does Chelsea talk about her mom at home?”
He shrugged, frustration replacing his earlier discomfort at asking for help. “Not much. In fact not at all unless Karla’s just called, and even then it’s just to say that her mom says hi and she’s doing fine.”
“It might help her to talk more about her mother’s illness or the danger her dad’s facing, or both. She could even keep a journal, writing down feelings.”
Alex frowned. He’d known she shouldn’t keep her feelings bottled up, but he felt powerless trying to help her. “She doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.”
“You know there’s a difference between want and need. She needs to talk about her feelings, and if she won’t initiate the conversations, you might have to. Either that or I can have her talk to the school counselor.”
“No, that’s okay.” Counselor. He didn’t even like the sound of that word. It was bad enough asking the teacher for help, but asking some professional counselor would be like admitting failure. Like admitting he couldn’t handle the situation when he’d promised Karla he would.
Instead of arguing for counseling as he expected—he’d always thought that women single-handedly financed the counseling industry—she nodded. “Be prepared, though. There might be a lot of tears when she finally opens up.”
Alex shivered at the notion. “You sure know how to kill a guy.”
“Where is Chelsea now?”
Alex glanced at his watch. “She’d be off the bus now. My next-door neighbor stays with Brandon and Chelsea until I get home from work. I know it isn’t a perfect situation.”
“You’re doing the best you can. It has to be good enough.”
He doubted that whatever he did would be good enough. But she was right. He was doing the best he could. He’d had to call in favors from all of his fellow firefighters to even be able to temporarily pull weekday eight-to-five shifts when usual shifts were twenty-four hours on and forty-eight off. He didn’t know how long he could expect his coworkers to make concessions for him so he could care for his cousin’s children.
“How’s Brandon doing with having a babysitter?”
“He doesn’t fight me too much on it anymore, not since I told him the sitter was really for Chelsea. It’s about the only thing he doesn’t fight me on lately.”
“Sounds like a normal teenager.”
Alex frowned. He didn’t have a clue what normal teenagers did, and he barely remembered his own teen years.
“You’ve had an introduction to parenting by fire.”
“What do you mean?”
