—
THE REST OF the day hums along smoothly, as I memorize my students’ names and get to know their personalities. I even mostly manage to forget about Will until Edie loses her bottom left front tooth while eating her carrots and hummus at snack time. She’s already missing her bottom right, yet she is as jubilant as a tooth virgin as her classmates gather around to examine the bloody trophy. A veteran at loose and missing teeth, both in the actual pulling and in the recovery and storage, I help her rinse out the gap in her gum, then clean the tiny tooth, stowing it safely in one of the Ziploc baggies that I keep in my desk for such occasions. I pull out a pink Post-it note from another drawer and write “for the Tooth Fairy,” then draw a heart and slide the note into the baggie, sealing it.
“What do you think she’ll bring you?” I ask, gazing down at my plump heart, then looking right into Edie’s pretty eyes.
“Same thing she brought me for this tooth,” Edie says, pointing to the inside of her mouth as she thrusts her tongue into the hole. Her voice is low and raspy—the kind that will one day drive guys crazy.
“And what was that?” I ask, wondering about her mother’s voice, knowing that I’ll be unable to resist gathering intelligence all year long. I have already asked several questions about her little brother, learning that Owen’s nickname is O, that he has an airplane-motif bedroom, and that he “goes to time-out a lot.”
“She brought me a dollar coin,” Edie replies, which gives me a fresh pang, along with a wave of disappointment that I can’t paint Will and Andrea as overindulgent parents. Most Buckhead tooth fairies vastly overpay, but a dollar coin is both an appropriate amount and more satisfying than a crumpled bill. Damn.
As I hand the baggie to Edie, I regret my heart on the Post-it, worried that her parents will read into the artwork. But it is too late for a re-do, as Edie is already gripping it with a proud smile. She then marches over to her cubby and stows it in the back pocket of her monogrammed pink butterfly backpack. I tell myself that it’s no big deal, that Andrea and Will are likely too busy and too happy to scrutinize something so trivial. More important, I tell myself that I am a good teacher and a good person—and that sweet Edie deserves that heart even though her father shattered mine.
chapter two
MEREDITH
“Well, today sucked,” Josie announces as she waltzes into my kitchen and interrupts a rare moment of peace.
It is Thursday, my one day off every week, and I’ve just parked Harper in front of the television so I can go through my email. In other words, I don’t want company, and if my sister had, say, phoned first, I would have told her as much.
“Oh, hi, Kimmy,” I say over my shoulder, referencing the annoying neighbor on Full House who regularly barged into the Tanner house without knocking.
Josie, who still watches reruns of the show, a sign of her overall maturity, laughs and says, “Do you really expect me to ring the doorbell of my childhood home?”
I resist the urge to say yes because it’s no longer your home, Nolan and I bought it, fair and square—or I could point out that my husband and I need privacy and could have been having sex in the foyer, at least theoretically. Instead I take the high ground and leave it as a rhetorical question while I continue to click through my inbox.
“I mean—it really sucked,” Josie adds, hovering over me.
“What happened?” I ask, remembering that today was her first day of school, and positive that her answer involves her ex-boyfriend Will or his wife or their daughter, who was assigned to Josie’s class. She has talked about little else since receiving the class roster this summer, pretending to be outraged by circumstances that I know, deep down, delight her. Josie relishes drama that involves her stable of men, past or present.
She sighs, leaning on my desk. “Where do I begin?” she says, as I eye her scuffed gold flats and remind her that we are a shoeless-indoors household.
“C’mon, Mere,” she says as if this is the first time we’ve had this discussion. “You act as if I just walked through a field of feces. You really need to take some medicine for your OCD—I hear Zoloft is good for that.”