Clara wavered. She’d been planning to drag Maddie along to the store first thing—now that the kids had their appetites back, her poorly stocked fridge wasn’t going to cut it. And Thomas was prone to dissolving into good-bye tears whenever she stayed longer than normal. But anything was better than running a gauntlet back to her car.
“Maddie won’t be a problem?” She shifted her daughter’s weight to the other arm. Maddie was getting a bit big to hold comfortably for this long, not to mention that she was at this moment rhythmically yanking on two enthusiastic fistfuls of Clara’s hair. Miss Lizzie gently touched Maddie’s arms, and the baby stopped pulling, as if transfixed by her touch.
“Not today she won’t,” Miss Lizzie said, and Maddie burst into a jack-o’-lantern smile.
Clara shook her head. So Miss Lizzie was some kind of baby whisperer, in addition to wrangling dozens of preschoolers in a way that put their parents’ inability to corral just one to shame. Maybe Clara would pick up a few pointers while she stuck around. She knelt to Thomas’s level, and Maddie wriggled out of her arms and headed for a pile of oversized foam blocks.
“How about Mommy stays for circle time this morning?”
He threw his arms around her neck. “I will love you forever, Mommy,” he murmured in her ear, surprising her. She pulled back to look at him, expecting him to say something silly, but his eyes were gravely searching hers for a reply, and she found herself fighting tears. That was the thing about kids. Even when they didn’t really know what they were saying—Thomas had no concept of yesterday or next week, much less forever—they could melt you with it.
“Oh, sweetie. I will love you forever ever after.” She hugged him tight again, and then the moment was over, and he was bouncing in a circle yelling, “Can my mommy read the story? Can my mommy read the story? She reads the BEST stories! She does VOICES!”
And that is how Clara came to be midway through Desert Rose and the Contrary Coyote—throwing herself into a thick Texan accent and quite enjoying Rose’s exclamations of “Hold your horses!”—when Miss Lizzie’s intercom buzzed and a moment later the teacher was whispering to Clara that her presence was requested in the director’s office. Miss Lizzie smiled apologetically as she gently palmed the book and took over reading, and she even managed to pacify Thomas when he started to protest, though Clara could see the bravery in his bottom lip as he tried his hardest not to cry.
“Be right back,” she mouthed to him, holding up a finger as she swallowed her annoyance that this surely could have waited until Desert Rose got her fences mended. Just to show that her own priorities were straight, she took Maddie by the hand and let her mosey her way through the empty hallways to the lobby, where the director’s office was behind a glass wall.
Pam, a sterner variety of earth mother who did not like to be addressed with a “Miss” in front of her name the way the teachers did, stood when she caught sight of Clara and gestured to her visitors’ chairs, getting right to the point before Clara had even taken her seat. “You know how much we care about all our enrolled families here at Circle of Learning. It’s so nice to see that Thomas seems unaffected by all the distractions in his own circle right now.” She was wrapped in gauzy layers of scarves that gave her a sheen by comparison.
Clara thought back to Thomas’s tight arms around her neck, his out-of-the-blue proclamation. She knew he didn’t really grasp what was going on, but she wasn’t entirely sure he was unaffected, either. Still, she didn’t like the way Pam said the word distractions, as if Clara herself had been throwing rowdy dance parties at bedtime or starting food fights with his snacks. “It is a little surreal having so much going on next door.” Clara said the last two words emphatically, hoping to punctuate the fact that the distractions were not in his “circle” exactly, but on the outer rim. “We’re just trying to stick to as much normalcy as possible.”
Pam frowned. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Normalcy is important for all children in our circle. But there’s no normalcy here with Thomas on-site. I’ve had moms holding up traffic in the parking lot, ringing my direct line off the hook…”
“Surely not off the hook. We’ve been here less than an hour.”
“That’s exactly my point. Five minutes is all it took. I simply can’t have these distractions.”
“Pam, the distractions you’re referring to are related to another family enrolled here. Not ours. We just happen to be their neighbors. Certainly you can’t hold us—”
“You didn’t have any problems associating yourself with them on paper.”
“I certainly did have a problem with that. And I didn’t associate myself with it. Someone else associated me. A twelve-year-old, I might add. Surely you of all people know that children have minds of their own.”
“Be that as it may, we require a calm and holistic environment for our learning approach to be put into practice.” Clara bit down on her tongue. The center had password-protected webcams where parents could watch the classrooms during the day, and she’d seen how very far from calm and holistic many days could be.
“You’re not asking me to remove Thomas from the school? He loves it here.”
“Certainly not. Merely to temporarily step away. Until the distractions subside.”
Clara bristled. “This is a small town. Moms are going to be gossiping in your parking lot about these distractions you’re referring to whether we’re here or not!”
“Still, in focusing on what we can control, we feel an arm’s length approach is a healthy approach.”
Clara sat up straighter. Pam was serious. “There’s no such thing as an arm’s length approach when two of your own students are missing, your staff members and parents have been interviewed by police—”
“That was last week. Do you or do you not have media parked outside your home as we speak?”
“I do not.” They were merely driving past it on a loop.
“Well, that makes one of us.” Pam crossed to her window and opened the blinds. At the street entrance, next to the CIRCLE OF LEARNING sign, a reporter was standing, microphone in hand, in front of a camera, talking and gesturing at the building behind her.
“This is a first,” Pam said. “We can’t have them following you here. As soon as everyone has room to self-center, Thomas is welcome back.”
Clara stared out the window. Aside from the news team, the parking lot was half empty now, quiet. The trees around its rim were warm bursts of color in the breeze, taunting her that the season was in full swing and the end-of-summer party that never happened was soon to be a distant memory—and Kristin along with it.
“They were bound to show up sooner or later,” she said weakly. “They’re reaching, running out of things to say.” She turned back to Pam, who merely shook her head. “Come on, Pam. They’re out by the street, not storming the lobby.”
Pam didn’t acknowledge that she’d spoken. “We’ll be organizing a penny wars fund-raiser in the twins’ names to benefit the Greater Dayton United Way,” she said instead. “I’ll be sure to send you the information in case you’d like to collect donations from your neighborhood.”
The annoyance Clara had been fighting all morning surged into the unfairness of the past couple weeks and overtook her. “A freaking Tahoe was double-parked in your fuel-efficient spots today, and I’m the disruption tipping the perfect balance here?”
“Watch your language, please.”
She couldn’t help it—she rolled her eyes. If freaking was not a holistic enough variation of what she’d really meant to say, then one did not exist. “It’s a V-8,” she said, in protest.
“Might I suggest you take some time to rejuvenate your own soul as well? To lose a friend is to suffer quite a loss. It’s a sisterhood not always acknowledged by the masses, but a very real one nonetheless.”
Clara would have been more receptive to the sentiment had the sisterhood not just put her family outside its circle.