A Son's Tale. Tara Quinn Taylor
Читать онлайн книгу.
spent most of Thursday night cutting and pasting many mediums of primary colors because the woman who’d volunteered to do so several weeks before had forgotten. In spite of the many calls Morgan had made to ensure that the party’s decor was on track. She really should have asked to see some finished product when the woman had offered to provide samples.
But with her university courses, the day care and schoolwork she did in the evenings, she hadn’t had time to babysit a parent.
And rather than letting anyone else know that she’d done it again—she’d placed her faith in someone who hadn’t proven trustworthy—she’d taken care of the fallout on her own.
Someday she might learn not to always think the best of people, not to be so quick to believe they were going to do what they said they would—but she doubted it.
“Let’s consider Twain’s ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,’” Dr. Whittier said, looking straight at Morgan at that Friday morning’s lecture. She was sure he was looking at her because she’d been working on day-care decor yesterday evening rather than rereading the short story as she’d intended. You’d think, with only one last class to complete before graduation, she’d be able to keep up with the homework. He’d assigned the reading material at the end of Wednesday morning’s class, and although she’d read everything by her favorite American writer, she hadn’t read “Hadleyburg” since before Sammie was born.
Her son was ten.
“Twain was sixty-three years old and in Vienna when he wrote this story,” Whittier was saying. Didn’t matter how blistering the Tennessee sunshine made their city, the man always wore a tie. He’d left his jacket and long sleeves at home, but still…
Of course, the man did things—sexy things—to that ordinary tie. Things she was convinced no man had ever done before.
“Someone provide us with a quick overview of the plot,” Whittier said. He glanced her way.
Morgan’s stomach gave an irritating leap. She remembered the basics, but…
His gaze moved on. Her stomach didn’t settle.
Yes, she was attracted to her English professor. She and every other female student at Wallace University.
“It’s about, um, the corruption of an honest town.” One such female creature quickly grabbed the opportunity to snare Whittier’s attention. Bella Something-or-Other was thin, blonde, about twenty, and didn’t have one responsibility on those perfect shoulders or one line on her equally perfect face. “Hadleyburg is known for its honesty. Then some guy sends money to someone in town for a good deed and everyone in town tries to claim the good deed to get the money.”
The Richardses, Morgan remembered. They were the old couple in Hadleyburg that the stranger sent the money to for safekeeping.
“Right,” Whittier said, and Bella preened. Sick. The girl was just sick.
Morgan tried to let her sleepless night catch up with her. To be bored in English class just for once. More to the point, she tried to be bored with the man who taught her favorite class.
“Hudson Long, a Twain biographer, claims that Twain uses this story to depict the pessimistic attitude that he had toward himself and the human race in general. Would you agree with that?”
He was asking the class.
“No.” Morgan blurted the word against her better judgment. She was as bad as the kids, preening for the man’s attention. Her better judgment had deserted her sometime between leaving her mother’s womb and landing in her cradle.
“Why not?” Whittier’s gaze was all hers.
In four years of being in the man’s classes, she should be over getting warm every time she had his attention.
But, recently, they’d been talking more.
“Because I think it’s unfair to label the man as pessimistic just because he had the ability to see deeply inside the human condition and then was giving and talented enough to bring out his vision in such a way that we can all take honest looks at ourselves.”
“So you think you know more about Mark Twain than an official Twain biographer?” His brown eyes were not unkind as he met her head-on. Instead, they had that peculiar light of enjoyment that kept her up nights.
“I’m not saying I know more than a Twain scholar,” Morgan replied, aware of the other, mostly younger students watching her. She felt ancient at twenty-nine. “But I agree with another Twain biographer, Jerry Allen, who says that Twain wrote ‘Hadleyburg’ because of all the maliciousness that he saw in mankind and the hopelessness that was our plight if we didn’t change. I think Twain was giving us a view of ourselves, exaggerated, as an analogy.”
Whittier’s responding smile did it to her again. “Good answer,” he said, walking back over to the other side of the room.
His legs were long and firm and he moved with the grace of an athlete.
“I happen to agree with Ms. Lowen…” he was saying when Morgan’s phone vibrated against her hip.
She never went to class without that phone. Being the single parent of a strong-minded boy wasn’t easy work. Sammie always came first.
Morgan tried not to be too obvious as she glanced down at the screen, although Whittier knew about Sammie. Knew why she kept her phone on during class, and encouraged her to do so.
The vibration signaled a text from Julie Warren, the office administrator at Rouse Elementary where Sammie was in summer school taking art and swimming. Julie was also Morgan’s friend.
The message was one word: Call.
They had a lunch date. Maybe Julie had to cancel. Wouldn’t be the first time.
She typed her response.
In class. Emergency?
She sent the text off with one hand, leaving the phone in its clip.
The reply was almost instantaneous. Like Julie hadn’t waited for her reply before sending it.
S missing!
The phone vibrated again, but Morgan didn’t take the time to look down. Closing the lid on her notebook computer without shutting the thing down, she threw it on top of its case in her backpack. She had the bag slung on her shoulder before she was completely standing and was already digging in the side pocket for her car keys.
“My son…” She wasn’t even sure what she ended up blurting out as she ran from the room.
CHAPTER TWO
SILENCEHUNGOVERthe classroom for thirty seconds or more after Morgan Lowen’s dash from the room. Her frantic words—“My son is missing from school!”—occupied the space, squeezing out all the excess air.
And then the rumbling started—low voices emanating from seats all across the room. His students’ wide-eyed glances darted between one another, the door, him. One kid—“Jackass,” Cal had privately dubbed him—sat there staring at his electronic tablet, looking bored. That’s when Cal noticed the wireless device mostly concealed by the kid’s long, unkempt hair. He had an earphone in. And was listening to God knew what on Cal’s time.
“Class dismissed,” Cal said, filing away a mental reminder to pursue wireless Jackass at some future date.
Yeah, this was college. Yeah, students were responsible for their own education at this point. But he had more to teach than knowledge of American literature. He had the minds of tomorrow in his sphere and he took his job seriously.
He answered a couple of questions about a two-thousand-word paper due at midterm and confirmed that they’d be covering The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all of the following week as the syllabus stated.
“You