Learning Curve. Terry McLaughlin
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through her in an edgy accompaniment.
Emily planned on keeping the buzz buzzing with a liquid caffeine recharge and the semisweet chocolate bar she had hidden in the back of her kitchen junk drawer. Her schedule until the end of her college term, at Christmas, was a tight one: high school observations in the mornings followed by the lengthy commute to her university classes in the afternoons and evenings. She only had a few hours left to pound out a paper on Piaget due in tonight’s Ed Psych class. And she should record her impressions of day one in her Social Studies Methodology journal before day two hit.
Impressions. Joe Wisniewski, still and self-contained, striking a deceptively lazy pose. Hitching one hip over the edge of his desk, those dark eyes scanning the room for student outlaws. Gary Cooper, calmly lecturing ’til high noon.
Okay, so she was still a bit impressed by The Great and Powerful Wiz, thrilling to his slow grin, or the quirk of an eyebrow, or the rumble of that deep voice. Her adolescent tingles and twinges had matured into, well, more mature tingles and twinges.
There she sat, tucked into the corner of a classroom she’d dreamed of joining at thirteen and clawed her way into at twenty-nine, echoes of her adolescent longings tumbling through her insides while her outsides calmly took notes. Studying his every move, pondering his every word—and wondering what was wrong.
Maybe it was the contrast of her own excitement with Joe’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, maybe it was his laid-back ease and deadpan delivery, but nothing had been quite what she’d expected. He’d been a bit too laid-back, a bit too deadpan, not exactly the inspiring educational model she’d hoped for.
Still, he seemed to have a quiet rapport with his students. And he definitely had a subtle magnetism that tugged at her on every level. Her instincts told her there was something there, beneath the surface, something he was holding back.
But what if those instincts were nothing more than the kind of fantasizing she’d engaged in as a teen? What if this attraction turned into a major distraction? She needed to analyze his effect on her and his other students, not simply sit there and enjoy it. She needed to focus on her job, to evaluate his classroom management style, not get sidetracked by wide shoulders and lean hips.
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. She wouldn’t let it happen. Couldn’t let it happen. There was too much riding on this assignment: her career, her family’s approval, her own self-esteem. Her future.
She was in charge of her educational experience, not The Wiz. If he didn’t offer the inspiration she’d hoped for, she’d work harder to find it elsewhere. Maybe, with time, she’d find what she needed within herself, wrapped in her own dreams and abilities.
In the meantime, if she had to spend several months observing a subject, it might as well be a good-looking one. “Can I pick ’em, or can I pick ’em?” she asked no one in particular as the truck rattled over a series of potholes.
Daydreaming of dark eyes and a deep voice, Emily pulled into her gravel drive and swerved to avoid clipping the fender of a silver Volvo sedan.
Uh-oh. Mom alert.
Emily frowned. What was on Kay Sullivan’s agenda today? More questions about her daughter’s career choice? Doubts about her living arrangement? A reconnaissance mission to check on the refrigerator’s contents or the dryer’s lint trap?
At the moment, Kay was plucking weeds from the box of overgrown petunias on Emily’s front porch. She straightened and waved. “Yoo-hoo, Emily!”
Emily sighed. As if anyone could miss the tall, slim blonde in a bright red double-breasted dress with coordinating red lipstick and shoes. Kay’s was the only coordinated ensemble in the ragtag front yard—although the brownish patches of rust on the gutters did match the brownish patches of gopher mounds in the grass.
“Hi, Mom.” Emily hopped down from the truck, plotting a way to fast-forward through the visit so she could attack the Piaget project before it reached critical mass. Kay had a languid Louisiana way of drawing out an afternoon chat until it felt like a two-week delta cruise into the Twilight Zone.
Emily pointed to a wire-handled shopping bag near the doorstep. “What’s in there?”
“Cookies and milk, just like old times.” Kay’s cheek brushed Emily’s with the scent of gardenia. “To celebrate your first day of school.”
“Oatmeal and butterscotch?”
“With extra chips.”
Kay did have her good points—a couple dozen of them, judging from the size of the bag. Butterscotch could fill in for chocolate, in a pinch. And oatmeal counted as nutrition. She could chew fast, shorten the visit and skip dinner. “Sounds perfect. Except for the milk. I don’t drink it anymore.”
“I remember. But it goes with the cookies.”
Of course. Just because neither of them would actually drink the milk didn’t mean that the afternoon snack of cookies would be offered without the appropriate beverage. It simply wasn’t done. After all, Kay Sullivan was the high priestess of family food rituals. She packed a picnic luncheon every Fourth of July, even when it rained. Spread coconut frosting on the Easter cake, which everyone scraped off. And labored over a jellied tomato aspic every Thanksgiving, though no one had yet worked up enough courage for even one taste. That, too, was tradition: the untouched aspic, trembling on the table in virginal apprehension.
“You know,” said Emily, “they drink tea with cookies in England.”
“I suppose they do.” Kay picked up her package. “It would be rather continental, wouldn’t it?”
“Come on, Mom,” Emily said as she unlocked her door. “Let’s live dangerously. I’ll put the kettle on to boil.”
She caught her mother’s quick, discreet appraisal of the empty walls and curtainless windows as they stepped over the threshold. “My goodness,” Kay drawled. “It’s so refreshing, the way you’re using all this natural light and the open floor plan.”
Emily bit back an excuse and led the way to the kitchen.
“It’s probably best not to invest in things that may be discarded. This is simply a temporary situation, after all.” Kay’s smile was a hopeful one. “Who could possibly know how long you’ll be here?”
Emily dodged the question and arranged the cookies on a paper plate in the center of the tiny kitchen table. She knew her parents didn’t understand her decision to dip into her savings to make the move out of their Seattle condominium.
A change of subject was called for, and Emily knew just the tack to take—her sister-in-law’s pregnancy. “How’s Susan doing? Getting rounder?”
Kay’s eyes went soft and dreamy at the mention of her first grandbaby. “Just imagine, my little Jack, a father.”
“Someone new for you to spoil.”
“I never spoiled you and Jack.”
“I was talking about Dad.”
Kay laughed. “Oh, yes. I’ll admit to plenty of spoiling there. Although it always seems to work in both directions.”
Emily turned to snatch the screeching kettle off the burner. Oh, how she wanted that for herself, that deep affection glowing beneath the patina of years spent rubbing along together. A husband might be a low-priority item on her list of short-term goals, but she intended to have her own glow one of these years.
She poured boiling water over tea bags in her two least chipped mugs, set them on a tray with some folded paper towels and paper plates and snuck a peek at the pig-shaped garage-sale clock before carrying everything to the table. Three o’clock—time to get this visit moving toward the finale. “So, let me give you the completely condensed version of my first day at school. It was great.”
Kay cautiously lowered herself into a plastic lawn chair. “That’s wonderful, Em. But then, you’ve always been able to find some