“I can do that, Harding.”
The door behind them opened, and Rhonda Ivers walked into the room.
“You may go, Noah,” Harding said, and Noah was on his feet in a flash.
Vivi Ann grabbed his arm as he tried to pass her, yanked him around to face her. He was now eye to eye with her; tall and gangly. “You come straight home after school. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred bucks. Got it?”
He wrenched free. “Yeah, yeah.”
When he was gone, Harding said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Rhonda.” Giving them each a pointed look, he added, “Have your meeting here. I need to keep an eye on the lunch crowd.”
Rhonda waited for him to leave and then took a seat behind his big metal desk. Amid the piles of paper stacked on top of it, she looked frail and birdlike. She wore the same hairstyle and type of clothing she had some twenty years earlier when she’d tried to teach Vivi Ann to appreciate Beowulf. “Sit down, Vivi,” she said.
Vivi Ann was so tired of this; it felt as if she’d been battling one invisible foe after another for twelve years. Ever since Al had asked Dallas what he’d done on that Christmas Eve night.
“We all know Noah’s story,” Mrs. Ivers said when Vivi Ann sat down. “And his problem. We understand why he’s acting out, why he’s unhappy.”
“You think he’s unhappy? I thought . . . I hoped it was just normal teenage angst.”
Rhonda gave her a sympathetic smile. “You know the kids make fun of him?”
Vivi Ann nodded.
“He needs a friend, and perhaps some counseling, but that’s for you to decide, of course. I’m here because he is going to fail Language Arts this year. I’ve done the calculations and there’s no way he can make up all the lessons he’s missed.”
“If you hold him back a grade it will just compound his problem. Then they’ll think he’s stupid as well as . . . different.”
“Such was my analysis.” Mrs. Ivers pulled a black and white bound composition book out of her bag and slid it across the desk. “That’s why I’m giving Noah this one opportunity to save his grade. If he’ll fill this journal with honest writings this summer, I’ll pass him on to high school.”
Vivi Ann felt a wealth of gratitude for this woman she’d once called Mrs. Eyesore. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be so quick to thank me. This will be hard work for Noah. I’ll require eight pages a week all summer. I’ll meet with him each Monday to give him that week’s topic. We’ll begin next week before school. Say seven-fifty in my classroom? In late August, I’ll grade his work. I will not read his personal entries except to ascertain that it’s his own original work. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly.”
Mrs. Ivers smiled at last, a little sadly. “It can’t be easy on him.”
The past was always close in a town like this, like a layer of new snow on deep mud; noticeable. “No,” Vivi Ann said, reaching for the empty journal. “It’s not easy.”
By the time Vivi Ann returned to the ranch, it was almost time for her afternoon lessons. She passed her dad in the arena, where he was roping with a couple of buddies. The hired hands—day workers now; no more live-in help for Water’s Edge—were working the chutes. Waving, she went into the arena office and began creating flyers for next month’s cutting series.
In the past years, Water’s Edge had grown financially successful, but beneath the overhead lights inside the barn, little had changed. The arena still boasted rows of wooden bleachers and a series of gates and chutes for roping; three big yellow barrels were pushed to one side; they’d be pulled out and positioned for tonight’s barrel-racing jackpot. Inside the barn, horses had chewed down the wood wherever they could, leaving the slats scalloped. Cobwebs hung thick in the corners and flyers studded the walls with color, advertising stuff for sale, classes and clubs to join, and veterinary and farrier services. The arena schedule had been set for a long time now, too. She still ran a few jackpots a month, as well as a longer barrel-racing series; still taught lessons and trained horses. In addition, several clubs rented out use of the place regularly—drill clubs, 4-H Clubs, and horse shows. Once a month, kids with special needs came to ride. The only real difference was Vivi Ann herself; she no longer barrel-raced. She’d never been able to bring herself to replace Clem.
For the next four hours she worked nonstop. After school, the 4-H Club showed up, and she surrounded herself with girls still young enough to love their horses more than any boy and committed enough to practice what they were taught. She felt like a rock star around them, idolized and adored. Soon, she knew, these girls would grow up, sell their horses, and move on. It was the circle of life in these parts: horses came first, then boys replaced them and took the lead. At some point later on, those girls came back as women with daughters of their own and started the cycle all over again.
At the end of the day, she turned off the overhead lights, checked the horses one by one, and then went down to the farmhouse, where she found her father sitting in his favorite rocking chair on the porch. As usual lately, after a long day spent working the ranch, he was sitting on the porch, drinking bourbon and whittling a piece of wood.
He had aged in the past decade, remarkably so. His face, always craggy, had hollowed out, and his once-wild hair had thinned to a cottony fuzz. Bushy white eyebrows grew in tufts above his black eyes.
He was seventy-four, but he moved like an even older man. They never spoke of what had happened all those years ago, he and Vivi Ann, never brought up the arrest that had broken their family’s spine and split them in half.
They spoke of ordinary things now, sometimes barely looking at each other; it was as if part of their lives had frozen over and couldn’t be found. But Vivi Ann had learned that things didn’t always have to be talked about to be resolved. If you pretended long enough and hard enough that everything was fine, in time it could come to be true, or nearly so.
No one in town spoke of what happened all those years ago, either, not to Vivi Ann. There was a tacit agreement made by all to forget.
Unfortunately, it was Noah’s life that everyone in their farm-house and in town ignored so pointedly. The adults, anyway. The kids had obviously made no such pact.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, coming up the stairs. “We need another load of hay. Can you call Circle J?”