The Dearly Departed. Elinor Lipman
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hates anyone,” said Mrs. Mobilio.
“They’re lying,” Sunny told her chairman, Fred Samuels, who was sporting his trademark bow tie and buzz cut.
“More than one reported it.”
“Who were they?”
“I promised I wouldn’t say.”
“Why?”
“The usual fears—that you’d find out and they may have to face the music.”
“Me?” asked Sunny. “I’m the music?”
Samuels picked up his pen. “I need to ask your version of events.”
Sunny looked down at her lap. She’d been called out of practice and was still wearing a glove on her left hand.
“They say you called them names,” he prompted. “They said epithets were hurled—”
“They used that word? Epithets?”
“I need to know your version of events,” he repeated.
“This is not a version—this is the truth: I came into class and someone had drawn a naked man lying on top of a naked woman on the blackboard, and both were waving golf clubs in the air.” She took off her glove and stuffed it into the pocket of her chinos. “Not to be confused with the man’s erect, anatomically correct shaft.”
“I see. And what did you do?”
“I erased it, and then I turned around and said, ‘You’re like real-life clichés of nasty boys in movies about prep schools.’”
“They said you swore at them.”
“I called them nasty, spoiled brats.”
“Is there any chance you used the words little shits or shitheads?”
“None.”
“And if they reported that, they’d be lying?”
“Correct.”
“Still—it’s unusual for students to go to Mrs. Mobilio and complain about a teacher not having any control over the class.”
Sunny said, “Mrs. Mobilio? That changes the complexion of this matter slightly, I would say.”
Mr. Samuels’s face reddened.
“Clearly, you grasped the significance of the golf clubs.”
“Hard not to,” he murmured.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I am not having an affair with Chuck Mobilio.”
“I was quite sure of that,” he mumbled.
“It’s a stupid rumor based on the fact that he coaches varsity and I coach the j.v. and we happen to share an office.”
Samuels put his pen down and lowered his voice. “Entre nous?”
Sunny nodded.
“Chuck may have had a dalliance or two in the past, before you came here. There may be a problem between him and Nancy in the trust department.” He put his fingers to his lips. “You didn’t hear this from me.”
Sunny pictured the covert Mobilio gaze, the too-long and too-frank stare with which he punctuated their conversations when he thought no one else was watching.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” Samuels said. “I’m going to let you off the hook as far as teaching health is concerned—”
“Are you firing me?”
“No! I’ve already talked to some people in the offices—development and admissions—about administrative jobs there.”
“And you don’t think that relieving me of my duties is the same thing as firing me?”
Samuels shook his head. “You were hired principally to coach golf and move into the varsity slot after a one-year trial. I think the students admire you for that and at the same time appreciate that you were, shall we say, untested in the classroom.”
“Who’s going to teach health now?”
“Chuck.” He coughed into his closed fist. “Mobilio.”
“Great. Perfect choice, since mine are extremely small shoes to fill.”
“The school is honoring its contract,” Samuels said, his voice now cool and eye contact abandoned. “Golf ends on Friday, May twenty-seventh. Finals begin the following Monday. Graduation is June the second. I’m sure you can appreciate that we’re doing our best under the circumstances.”
“I’ll be gone on the third,” Sunny said.
Mrs. Peacock couldn’t help looking pleased that the next of kin to a tragedy had checked into her motel. There was a connection, she explained: Her husband worked for Herlihy Brothers Fuel, and it was the two bosses, Danny and Sean, who’d fixed the fatal furnace. Volunteered. For free. Not that Miss Batten’s mother was one of their accounts. Not at all.
“That was very kind of them,” said Sunny.
“It’s good public relations. They’re smart in that way.” She ran Sunny’s credit card through her machine, once, twice, frowning. “Sometimes it’s the phone lines and not the credit limit. I’ll swipe it through again.”
“There shouldn’t be a problem.”
“We have a two-night minimum starting June first,” said Mrs. Peacock, whose gray hair had a pale lavender cast and whose coral beads matched her coral clip-on earrings.
“Fine.”
“Don’t think people weren’t upset about all of this happening in King George. First, your mother and Miles Finn, then, before we turn around, we almost lose our police chief. Another few inches and a bullet would’ve killed him, which makes me wonder what’s so great about bullet-proof vests if you consider all the parts of the body they don’t cover.”
“I’m in number ten?” Sunny said after a pause.
“Last unit. Don’t put anything in the toilet but toilet paper. Our septic tank can’t handle anything else.”
“Fine,” said Sunny.
“You can get a decent breakfast—eggs, toast, home fries, bacon, coffee—at The Dot.”
Finally, Sunny smiled. “Do the Angelos still own it?”
“Yeah. He’s sick, you know.”
“Do they still make those maple sausages?”
“I eat at home. You can’t smoke there anymore. Besides, I don’t like paying a dollar-fifty for a fried egg.”
“I’d better unpack,” said Sunny.
At 5,6, and 11 P.M., Joey Loach watched himself on three Boston TV stations looking worse than he realized and needing a shave. No reporter had asked him the question he feared—Why, in a one-horse town with no crime and no criminals, were you wearing a bullet-proof vest?
“Was I wrong?” he would have said. “Wouldn’t I be dead now if I didn’t arm myself every morning when I left my house?” For three years his vest had been a secret, purchased with his own money, a promise he’d made to his mother and the condition on which she had let him go to the police academy.
Elsie Loach was both inconsolable about her son’s near disaster, imagining the inches in either direction that would have left him dead or paralyzed, and triumphant that she’d saved his life. She wanted him to resign immediately. No