“I will. He’ll like that.”
Of course he would, the bastard.
Claudia Kirkby was there as well, in her dignified heels and black skirt, cream shirt. She smiled at me, like always, and I knew I should have said it—it’s good to see you—but I couldn’t. After all, this was a tragedy. Clay was leaving school.
Mrs. Holland: “So, um, as I said, um, on the phone.” She was one of the worst ummers I’d ever known. I knew bricklayers who ummed less than her. “We’ve, um, got young Clay here wanting, to, ahh, leave us.” Damn it, she’d hit us with an ahh now, too; this wasn’t looking good.
I glanced at Clay sitting next to me.
He looked up but didn’t speak.
“He’s a good student,” she said.
“I know.”
“Like you were.”
I didn’t react.
She went on. “He’s sixteen, though. By, um, law we can’t really stop him.”
“He wants to go
and live with our dad,” I said. I’d wanted to add for a while, but somehow it didn’t come out.
“I see, well, um, we could find the closest school to where your father lives….”
Suddenly it came:
I was hit by a terrible numbing sadness in that office, in its sort-of-dark, sort-of-fluorescent-light. There’d be no other school, no other anything. This was it, and we all knew it.
I turned away, past Claudia Kirkby, and she looked sad, too, and so dutifully, damningly sweet.
Afterwards, when Clay and I walked to the car, she called out and chased us down, and there were her soundless, fast-running feet. She’d abandoned her heels near the office.
“Here,” she said, with a small stack of books. “You can leave, but you’ve gotta read these.”
Clay nodded, he spoke to her gratefully. “Thanks, Ms. Kirkby.”
We shook hands and said goodbye.
“Good luck, Clay.”
And they were nice hands, too; pale but warm, and a gleam in her sad-smiling eyes.
In the car, Clay faced his window and spoke, casual but also flatly. “You know,” he said, “she likes you.”
He said it as we drove away.
Strange to think, but I’d marry that woman one day.
* * *
—
Later, he went to the library.
He was there by four-thirty, and by five he sat between two great pylons of books. Everything he could find on bridges. Thousands of pages, hundreds of techniques. Every type, each measure. All jargons. He read through them and didn’t understand a thing. He liked looking at the bridges, though: the arches, suspensions, and cantilevers.