I’d seen this guy before and it took a moment to realize where. He’d only recently moved back to Parks, a hometown boy from the right side of Main Street. The local paper had covered his return as though he were a Kennedy. A local sports hero, a graduate of an upper-tier school out east, and now—my son’s guidance counselor? Probably a hushed story there.
“Ms. Winger? Joe Jeffries. So happy to finally meet you.” He had the sharpness of a paper crane in the shoulders, but around his eyes, I sensed something more animal. He was attractive, and I held that against him and also against the people who’d hired him. I tried not to think about the arm he’d had around the student.
I followed him into the office, already leery of that word: finally. Fine on paper, but in execution it certainly put out a notice of deficiency.
“I’ve been so eager to talk to you,” Jeffries said, gesturing to a chair. “For a couple of reasons, really. The first, as you might have guessed, concerns Joshua.”
I appreciated Jeffries’s efforts. I knew Joshua secretly went by “Josh” at school, but I wanted no part of that.
“I would imagine both reasons concern him,” I said.
“Actually, no.” He tapped a pencil on his desktop, and we both took the opportunity to look at the pencil instead of each other. “I heard through the grapevine what you do for a living. I find it incredibly fascinating.”
My heart fluttered. It was as if the alarm had sounded. Someone knocking on the door. A phone call in the night. Sometimes it struck me how unfair it all was. I was not the one who had ruined our lives—but I was the one who had to deal with the fallout, flitting from perch to perch. I was the one who had to decide, each time. Is it time to go?
In Kentucky, it was a phone call in the night, a familiar voice asking for a name I was starting to forget. In Chicago, years later, a woman on Michigan Avenue stared at me and said, It’s you, isn’t it? You’re that girl got herself drowned in Sweetheart Lake.
I drew a deep breath and tried out my voice. “It can also be quite tedious,” I said.
“Well, I’m fascinated,” he said. “And I think our students would be, too. Maybe you could come in for an afternoon to talk to the Honors Society or something?”
I shifted in my seat. How quickly news traveled in this town. “It’s not a sideshow act or anything,” I said. “I don’t do party tricks.”
I didn’t sound as certain of that as I normally did.
“Of course not,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean to suggest—I just thought the students would enjoy it.” He leaned over his desk, and the scent of him—soap, shaving cream, minty breath—wafted across the desk, an assault. The weight of his gaze made me wonder if I’d ever been really looked at. The sheriff—he’d had a good look at me at our first meeting. He’d really seen me, too, more than I wanted him to. “I just think—what a window into the soul,” Jeffries continued, poetic. Then he smiled. “And you must run up against some real damage. What’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever learned from someone’s writing?”
The chiding in his smile was familiar and, though it had been a while since I’d seen it, a little sexual.
I shook my head. “It’s not really like that.”
But it was. Until this week, I might have pulled some anecdote from my work with the lonelyhearts, the lovelorn people who send me scraps of letters and canceled checks believing that I can tell them something promising about the person they want to trust. Like the woman who’d sent me a love letter from a federal prisoner, in the hopes he was reformed. He wasn’t. Or I might have hidden enough details to tell a story from the confidential case files from working with Kent. But now of course it was Joshua’s incomplete classwork that came to mind. My son didn’t trust me, and he would lose himself to hide from me.
Across his desk, Jeffries waited. What he wanted was a sensational story that would turn my modesty false, something to retell in the faculty lounge later. I straightened in my chair and said, “I’ll think about your offer to join the lecture circuit. What was the other reason you wanted to see me? About Joshua?”
“Right, of course.” Jeffries reached for a file folder from his desk and riffled through a few loose pages. “Well, you probably aren’t surprised to hear he’s struggling. Math, especially. You might go over his homework with him each night, if you’re confident in your seventh-grade math, which—don’t be afraid to say that you aren’t.” He glanced up. Joshua didn’t want my help and he certainly didn’t want me looking at anything he’d written by hand. You could tell a lot from zeroes and twos. I shook my head. “Well,” he said, “you can try just checking to see that he’s done it. That’s a first step.”
“I can ask,” I said.
“What’s really bothering me about Joshua is less concrete. A couple of his teachers have mentioned he seems distracted or withdrawn. He’s missed a few assignments. In some of his classes, he doesn’t seem to be doing his homework at all, particularly some worksheets from his social studies class. Last week he refused to come to the board when one of his teachers asked him to . . .” He ran his finger over some notes. “Mrs. Tyler, English. She asked him to write a sentence across the board from their reading for some activity she had planned and he absolutely refused. She chose someone else but found it odd. Does this sound like your son?”
It didn’t sound like my son, but it sounded exactly like the stranger who’d moved into his bedroom.
“I’m not an expert in seventh-grade math or seventh-grade boys, Mr. Jeffries,” I said. Over Jeffries’s shoulder, a title in the bookcase caught my eye: Your Child in Conflict. Then another: The Age of Innocence Is Over. The spines of a hundred books and journals begged for my attention. No one was an expert.
I had to get it right, but the cracks were starting to show. For a moment, I let myself imagine Mr. Jeffries’s comforting arm around my shoulder as I confided in him. But: grapevine.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “About his attitude. And the math.”
“Well, if it helps, you can tell him that if his grades drop any further, he’ll be cut from football,” he said. “That would be out of my hands, though I’d hate to lose him.”
I stared at him. “Oh, you’re the—”
“The assistant coach, yeah.”
“Sorry I didn’t . . . I’ve been meaning to stop by practice.”
“No worries,” he said, flashing the smile again. “We have our first game coming up soon. Hope to see you there.”
Afterward, I walked the hallway, thinking about what Jeffries had said. The football team might be the bargaining chip I needed. Being on the team represented the most freedom Joshua had been able to negotiate. He’d worked so hard to make his case. But I’d never seen a schedule of the games. I was sure one existed, that it was being kept from me on purpose. But I couldn’t have it both ways. I couldn’t be mad the schedule wasn’t pinned up on the fridge when I didn’t want to go sit on hard bleachers and chitchat with the other parents.