Shadows

2

“Chili up, no tears!”

Brenda MacCallum heard the shout from the kitchen, but acknowledged it with no more than a quick nod of her head as she tried to keep up with the changing orders of the four men who were impatiently ordering lunch. Not that she could blame them for their irritability, but was it her fault that Mary-Lou had called in sick that morning, leaving just herself and Annette to deal with the lunch rush? Still, the slow service wasn’t the customers’ problem, and she held her temper carefully in check as one of the men changed his order for the third time. But when Max’s voice — etched with sarcasm this time — came again, his demand to know if she’d suddenly turned deaf combined with the heat of the day to snap the thread of her nerves.

“I hear you,” she yelled back. “But I’ve only got two arms and two feet.”

“More like one of each, given the service around here,” one of the men muttered.

Brenda clenched her jaw, firmly checking the words that hovered on the tip of her tongue, and turned away, heading for the kitchen. Only another forty-five minutes until the noon rush was over. Forty-five minutes until she could find the time to sit down and drink a cup of coffee while the feeling came back into her feet. As she passed the cash register, the phone beside it started ringing. But Brenda ignored it, moving on to the pass-through to slip the order onto the wheel and pick up the three bowls of chili that were still steaming under the warming lights.

“God damn it, Brenda,” Max growled. “You think the customers want their food stone cold?”

“If they want food, they don’t come here in the first place! And don’t yell at me — I’m not the one who called in sick.”

Max opened his mouth as if ready to fire back at her, but then seemed to decide it wasn’t worth it. And he was right, Brenda reflected as she balanced the three bowls of chili, a basket of stale sourdough bread, and a dish of grated cheddar cheese that was rapidly turning orange, on her left arm, while she picked up the limp salads with her right. This was not the day to push her, not after this morning, when she’d all but had to force Josh into going to school, and tend with the baby’s colicky stomach as well.

As she threaded her way to the table where three women — with whom Brenda had gone to high school only ten years ago — waited for their lunch, she caught sight of herself in the mirror behind the soda fountain, and her heart sank.

Though she was the same age as the three women who were waiting impatiently for their chili, she looked at least ten years older. Her hair, once a luxuriant mane of naturally blond curls, had darkened into a drab, limp mass that looked as if it hadn’t been washed for a week, even though she’d shampooed it this morning right after Josh finally left for school.

Her face had taken on the first lines of middle age, although she was still only twenty-eight. Which, she ruefully realized as she delivered the chili to her three former schoolmates, was nobody’s fault but her own. After all, it had been her decision to marry Buck MacCallum, even in the face of her mother’s objections, as well as those of everyone she knew. But back then, Buck had been as handsome as she was pretty, and she’d been too young to see anything beyond his well-muscled body and his thickly-lashed brown eyes.

Eyes, she’d quickly discovered, that never missed a pretty face — and some not so pretty ones, too.

Within a year of Josh’s birth, Buck had taken off, bored with Eden, bored with pumping gas and fixing carburetors at the Exxon station, bored with her. So she’d come to work for Max, waiting on tables and struggling to make enough to support herself and Josh.

And then, a year and a half ago, she’d run into Charlie Decker for the first time since high school, and thought her problems were over. Charlie had flattered her, told her she didn’t look any different than when she’d been the homecoming queen nine years earlier. He promised to take her and Josh to San Francisco as soon as a deal he was working on came through.

They’d made plans to get married, and when she’d become pregnant, Brenda hadn’t worried at all.

Until she’d called Charlie in San Francisco to tell him the good news, and a woman had answered the phone.

A woman who turned out to be Mrs. Charlie Decker. The woman who had occupied the position for six years.

And who told her that if she wanted Charlie, she was welcome to him, because Brenda was the third goddamn tramp who’d called in the last year, wondering when that no-good son of a bitch was going to come and get her.

Shaking, Brenda had hung up the phone and put Charlie Decker out of her mind. No point in even telling him about her pregnancy. When Melinda was born, she’d given the little girl Buck MacCallum’s last name, figuring if it was good enough for herself and Josh, it couldn’t hurt Melinda, either.

But that was when the ends had finally stopped meeting, and she’d had to go on food stamps to keep their stomachs full.

The sound of Annette’s voice broke through her reverie just as she was putting the last of the order down in front of her old schoolmates. “What’s wrong with you, Brenda?” Annette was demanding. “Can’t you hear me? It’s Arnold Hodgkins, and he says he has to talk to you now!”

The three women at the table glanced inquiringly at her. Brenda’s heart sank. No, she told herself as she started toward the phone. Not yet. Not the first day. Please? But her heart sank further as she heard the school principal’s voice on the phone.

“Hello, Mrs. MacCallum.” The three words were freighted with a note of tired resignation that told her the whole story.

“Oh, Lord,” she sighed. “What’s Josh done this time?”

“He started a fight in the cafeteria,” Arnold Hodgkins replied. “He claims it wasn’t his fault, that he was just sitting there reading a book, and that everyone else was picking on him.”

“And the rest of them say he just freaked out,” Brenda finished for him, already knowing what was coming. She’d hoped that after the trouble last year, it would be over with, that by following the school’s recommendation to skip Josh into the next class, he’d be challenged enough to stop relieving his boredom in the classroom with constant troublemaking and displays of temper. Well, so much for that hope.

“I think you’d better come down here,” Hodgkins was saying. “He’s not talking at all, and he’s refusing to go back to class.”

Brenda scanned the packed tables of the café, then noted the time once more. She could see Max glowering at her from the kitchen. Catching her eye, he nodded meaningfully at the orders that were piling up beneath the lights in the pass-through.

She weighed her options, then made up her mind.

“Mr. Hodgkins, I can’t come right now. It’s the middle of the lunch hour rush, and one of the other girls didn’t come in. Max is already glaring at me, and if I take off, he’ll fire me. Can’t you put him in the library or something? Just for an hour?” Her voice had taken on a plaintive note, and she instinctively turned away from the dining area and the eyes of the women who had once been her friends.

Blessedly, the school principal seemed to understand. Almost to her surprise, she heard him agree. “All right. I’ll keep him in my office. But try to make it within an hour, would you? I’ve got a meeting with the head of the school board, and I don’t intend to be late.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hodgkins. I’ll get there within an hour, I promise.”

She hung up the phone and hurried toward the pass-through, where Annette was trying to cope with the backlog of orders. Max was hunched over the grill, his back to her.

“Trouble?” Annette asked.

Brenda nodded, then spoke to Max. “I’m going to have to take off for an hour after we get through lunch. It’s Josh …”

Max glanced sourly up from the griddle where he was tending to a dozen hamburgers. He shoved his spatula at one and flipped it with a violent slash of the wrist. “How come he always has problems on my time?”

Brenda took a deep breath, wanting to snap back that Josh was only ten years old, that all kids have problems, and that this particular problem was cutting into her day just as much as it was his. Unless, she reflected darkly, he was suddenly planning to pay her for the hour she would be gone. Now that would be a first. But she said nothing.

Finding this job hadn’t been easy; finding another would be even harder.

Annette, sensing her distress, smiled encouragingly. “Hey, take it easy. You can have a couple of my hours tomorrow night, and it’s not like the tips are heavy after lunch. Do what you have to do, and screw Max, right?”

“Right,” Brenda agreed, her lips twisting wryly as she picked up another batch of orders and started toward a table next to the window. But screwing Max wasn’t the answer, because Max wasn’t the problem.

Josh was, and right now she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was going to do about it.

At one-thirty, with all but two of the tables empty and reset for the after-school crowd of teenagers, Brenda took off her apron and hung it on one of the hooks at the end of the kitchen where the lockers were. Max’s perennially angry eyes fixed on her as she started for the door.

“You plannin’ to wear my uniform on your own time?”

“It’s only an hour, Max. It’s not like I’m taking the afternoon off to go dancing.” She glanced down at the pink nylon dress with a too-short skirt. “And if I were, I wouldn’t go wearing this crummy thing.”

“That ‘crummy thing’ cost me fifteen bucks,” Max growled. “An’ I don’t have to provide uniforms at all, you know. If that kid pukes on it—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Max! Can’t you be a human being for even five minutes? Josh isn’t sick, he’s just—” She floundered, searching for the right words, but Max cut in before she found them.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s just too smart for his own good, right? ’Cept it seems to me if he was so damn smart, he’d learn to keep himself out of trouble. You just get back here in an hour, understand?”

“Okay,” Brenda replied, taking his dismissal as tacit permission not to bother changing her clothes. She hurried out the back door, the midday heat instantly making her break into a sweat that caused the nylon dress to cling clammily to her skin, and slid behind the wheel of her nine-year-old Chevy.

The engine ground disconsolately when she turned the key, and Brenda swore silently. “Please, please,” she murmured, twisting the key over and over again, and resisting the urge to press the accelerator to the floor. “Just this once, don’t give up on me.”

Just as the battery was about to give out, the engine caught, coughed grumpily, then began chugging. Keeping her foot on the gas, Brenda reached back and cranked down the rear windows, then leaned over to the one on the front passenger side. It was permanently stuck in the closed position, but she always tried anyway, on the theory that miracles do happen now and then, and one of them just might befall her ruin of a car.

No luck.

She backed out of the parking space into the alley, and a moment later was on Main Street, heading out to the school. Eden Consolidated, a group of mock-adobe buildings was huddled on the edge of town. Beyond it was nothing but an arid expanse of desert, eventually broken by mountains dimly visible through the constant haze of smog that drifted out from Los Angeles, two hundred miles away.

Brenda drove slowly, wanting to take a few minutes to collect herself before she had to face Arnold Hodgkins. As tempting as it was to feel sorry for herself, she resisted. She suddenly had an image of herself in an old Bette Davis movie. What was the name of it? She couldn’t remember. The one where Bette was a waitress in a crummy café in the desert, and there wasn’t even a town around it, not even one as worn-out as Eden. And Davis had never had so much as a single romance, except with a poet who didn’t really care about her.

At least I’ve been in love a couple of times, Brenda reflected with the innate honesty and black humor that had gotten her through some of the worst moments of her life, even if they were rats. And I’ve got a couple of kids who definitely aren’t rats! In fact, one of them’s a genius, for all the good it does any of us right now. And we’re not starving, and we have a place to live, and things could be a lot worse.

Almost to her own surprise, she found herself humming as she pulled the car into the school parking lot and made her way to Arnold Hodgkins’s office. But her composure deserted her as she spotted her son slouched in a chair in the corner of the principal’s office, his large dark eyes, as heavily lashed and deep as his father’s, staring sullenly up at her.

“Well, look at you,” Brenda said. “Sit that way much longer, and you’re going to get a hunchback.”

“Who cares?” Josh replied, making no move to correct his posture.

“I do, for one,” Brenda told him. “And until you sit up properly, I’m not going to listen to your side of the story.”

Josh made a face indicating that he didn’t think she was going to listen to him anyway, but straightened up in the chair.

“It was Ethan,” he said. “He started it. All I was doing was reading Les Miserables, and he came up and grabbed the book away from me. He wouldn’t give it back, so I threw my milk at him.”

Brenda’s gaze shifted from Josh to Arnold Hodgkins. “What does Ethan Roeder have to say about it?”

The principal shrugged, and waved Brenda into a chair. “Just what you’d think — that he didn’t do anything. According to Ethan, Josh had no reason to throw a carton of milk on him.” He shook his head helplessly. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can do, since the rest of the children all back up Ethan’s story.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Brenda broke in. “Ethan’s two years older than Josh, and at least twenty pounds heavier and three inches taller. And I don’t care what other problems Josh might have, he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t pick a fight with someone as big as Ethan!”

The principal’s hands spread in a gesture of frustration. “Mrs. MacCallum, try to calm down. I’m not taking sides — I’m simply reporting what I was told by the other children. Nor is it the first time there have been reports of Josh behaving with unprovoked violence.” He paused, then went on. “Unfortunately, this is not the only episode you and I need to discuss today.”

Brenda hesitated, her indignation blunted. “You mean there’s more?” she asked.

Hodgkins chewed uncomfortably at his lower lip. “Rita Schulze was here during lunch hour. It seems she had a little run-in with Josh just after the morning session ended.”

Brenda’s eyes moved back to her son. Josh squirmed in his chair. “She wouldn’t leave me alone,” he complained. “Every time she asked a question, she made me answer it, like I’m some kind of freak or something. All the rest of the kids were staring at me, and talking about me, and—”

He fell silent as he read the anger in his mother’s eyes.

“So you were rude to your teacher, and threw milk on Ethan? Is that it?”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, Josh. I want to know what happened.”

“I’m telling you, Mom! I didn’t do anything!” Josh’s eyes flicked around the room, as if he were searching for some avenue of escape, and Brenda reached out, taking his chin in her hand, forcing him to look at her.

“Is that the truth, Josh?”

Silently, Josh nodded. After a moment Brenda let her hand drop away and turned tiredly back to the principal.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “It was the same thing last year. Bill Cooley was always holding Josh up to the rest of the class, like they should all be as smart as he is. It wasn’t fair to them, and it sure wasn’t fair to Josh.”

Arnold Hodgkins’s gesture of helplessness expanded. “It’s a difficult situation.” he admitted with obvious reluctance. “But—”

“But you shouldn’t have skipped him again.” Brenda cut in, her voice rising to an angry crescendo. “You should have left him with his class.”

Hodgkins shook his head doggedly. “That’s not the problem! Not the problem at all! The problem, when you get right down to it, is that we just don’t have any programs for kids like Josh. The school’s too small, and the resources too limited.”

Brenda MacCallum stared at the principal. “So what am I supposed to do? Take Josh out of school? It’s not my fault this place can’t deal with him.”

Now Hodgkins leaned forward, picking up a pamphlet from his desk. “I didn’t say it was your fault, Mrs. MacCallum, and if I implied it at all, I’m sorry. But the facts are the facts. There isn’t much we can do for Josh here. He needs special programs, with specially trained teachers, and he needs to be with other kids like himself.” His eyes fixed on the pamphlet, which had arrived on his desk only last week, along with a computer-generated “personalized” letter suggesting that perhaps Josh MacCallum might be a candidate for the school the pamphlet described. Initially he had dismissed both the letter and the pamphlet, certain that the solicitation had been stimulated by nothing more than the centrally scored IQ tests all the Eden children had taken last spring. But after the incident in the cafeteria, he had studied the brochure more closely.

Brenda, still dazed by thè principal’s last words, stared at him. “What are you saying? You think I should just pick up and move? You think I can just pide up and move? And even if I could, where am I supposed to go? How am I supposed to find the kind of school you’re talking about?” Before she could go on, Hodgkins handed her the pamphlet

It was from a place called the Barrington Academy. A sketch of a large mansion surrounded by a broad lawn studded with towering pine trees was printed on the heavy buff-colored paper. She stared at it quizzically, then looked up at Arnold Hodgkins. “What’s this? It doesn’t look like any school I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s not,” Hodgkins replied. “It’s a private school designed for gifted children. It’s up north at—”

But Brenda MacCallum didn’t let him finish. She was already on her feet, her eyes blazing. “Private school?” she demanded. “Where am I going to get the money for private school? I’m a waitress. I get minimum wage, plus tips, and let me tell you, in Eden the tips aren’t much! Since Melinda was born, I’ve even had to go on food stamps!” She paused to fight back her tears, then, summoning what dignity she could gather, went on. “I’ll have a talk with Josh, and make sure that from now on he behaves himself. I would appreciate it if you made sure the rest of the kids around here — and the teachers, too — stop making him feel like some kind of freak! Come on, Josh.”

Arnold Hodgkins rose out of his chair and started around the desk. “Mrs. MacCallum, wait. There’s a lot more we need to talk about. If you’ll just calm down—”

But it was too late. Brenda, clutching Josh by the hand, was already halfway down the hall. For a moment Hodgkins considered going after her, but decided that in the woman’s present mood, there was nothing he could say.

The problem of Josh MacCallum could wait, but the president of the school board could not.

Brenda drove silently along the ragged edge of Eden toward the decaying building in which she lived, feeling Josh’s anger radiating toward her, but doing her best to ignore it. When Josh finally spoke, she knew she had to respond.

“You didn’t have to talk about me like I wasn’t even there,” he said.

For a moment Brenda thought she might cry. She reached out and squeezed her son’s knee. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I just got so mad at Mr. Hodgkins that I forgot you were listening.”

“Well, I was. And I heard everything you said. And it’s not fair, Mom. I didn’t do anything at all.”

Brenda took a deep breath. “I’m not saying you did, sweetheart. But if all the other kids—”

“They’re all liars!” Josh shouted, his anger bursting forth. “How come no one ever believes me? It’s not fair!” He reached into the book bag, jerked out the book he’d been reading in the cafeteria, then began ripping its pages out, one by one. Rolling down the window, he flung the pages out into the desert breeze. Brenda could see them fluttering behind the car.

“Josh! What are you doing? Do you know how much that book cost? I had to order it special from Los Angeles!”

“I don’t care!” he shouted. “I hate the book, and I hate school, and I hate Mrs. Schulze and Mr. Hodgkins and everyone else! I hate it all!” With every furious sentence, he yanked another page from the book and flung it out the window, until he was pulling them out by the fistful, filling the area behind the car with a storm of white. “And I hate you, too,” he yelled. “I hate everybody and everything!”

Brenda reached over and snatched what was left of the book out of his hands, tossing it into the backseat. “Well, let me tell you, buddy-boy, right now I’m not too crazy about you, either.”

For a moment she thought she was going to slap her son. Then her gaze settled on the open window by his side.

For the first time in two years, it was wide open.

The little miracle had actually happened.

As Josh stared at her in amazement, Brenda threw her head back and began laughing out loud.

A moment later, though, her laughter choked off, then died. As the reality of her life, and the life of her son, closed back in on her, she began to cry.

The miracle of the open window, she decided, was just too little.

What she needed was a much larger miracle.

But where would it come from?