Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4)

by Rosalind James

  They were sitting at the old-fashioned yellow dinette table in the kitchen, as usual. “Yeah,” Mac agreed. “We should keep this one. I’ll add it to the book.” Which was their recipe book, maintained by Mac, complete with color-coded dividers. Nothing fancy in there, but then, neither one of them liked fancy much. Jim wasn’t always home for dinner—it depended on his shifts—but when he was, the meal was a team effort.

  They’d started doing it together when Maya had been sick, and they weren’t too bad at this point.

  It had been Maya’s suggestion. “It’d be good for both of you,” she’d said. “Bonding time, like girls usually have with their mothers.” She hadn’t said that both of them would need that, because Mac wouldn’t be growing up with a mother. She hadn’t needed to. She’d just set things up so he and Mac would have their best shot at “normal.” A new normal.

  “So,” he said to Mac now. “Open house. Got a schedule for me?”

  Mac leaned over, rummaged in her pack, and pulled out a neatly filled-in block schedule with classes and teachers listed.

  “Intimidating,” Jim said, chewing a chunk of sausage and looking down the list. “Finding my way to all these rooms again. I hope they’ve changed the desks since I went there. I may have carved some things into a couple of them. That’d be embarrassing.”

  “Try being me,” Mac said. “I’m actually in sixth grade, not remembering it. And I think you can find your way. Use your compass.”

  He had to smile. “That shouldn’t be OK with me. Too bad I think you’re funny. I kind of miss back-to-school night at the elementary school, though. Looking at your maple-leaf poem and reading your short sto—” He stopped with his finger on the last block. “Who’s this last one? World Geography?”

  Ms. Cavanaugh, it read. Room 115.

  “I told you,” Mac said, making a business of twirling spaghetti squash around her fork. “That we were going to have a long-term sub, because Ms. Bailey broke her back in that accident. She’ll be gone at least until January. I told you.”

  “You did,” Jim said. “And I remembered.”

  It would’ve been pretty hard to forget, considering that he’d been the first officer on the scene.

  It was one of the bad ones, but not the worst. A teenaged driver, crossing the center line and hitting the other car head-on. As always seemed to happen, the kid who’d made the mistake hadn’t ended up too bad off. But the other driver, Charlene Bailey, had been screaming with the pain of what had turned out to be a fractured back. And with fear.

  “My baby,” she’d kept moaning, the thought overriding even her pain. “My baby.”

  A bald little boy of barely three months, wailing with fear, but blessedly unhurt. Jim had taken the baby over to Charlene once the EMTs had checked him out and said, loud enough to make it through the baby’s wails, but keeping it strong and calm, “Your little boy’s fine, Charlene. He’s just fine. See, here he is.”

  “Is he OK? Is he OK?” she’d kept saying. “He’s crying. Oh, God. It hurts.” The EMT had slipped a mask over her face, then, had gotten her breathing oxygen and narcotic painkillers, but her eyes had still been wide and panicked above the plastic.

  “He’s all good,” Jim had said. “Look. I’ve got him, and he’s fine. I’m going to make sure he’s safe. Don’t you worry.”

  He’d seen her eyes calm and glaze with the painkiller and his promise, and he’d kept his word and held the boy until his mother had been rushed away. The baby had quieted eventually, maybe because his mother wasn’t crying anymore, and Jim had held the surprisingly solid little body close, the baby’s head nestled into his neck in that killer way babies had, had felt the tiny bones of his spine under his palm, and had told him, “You’re OK, bud. You’re fine. And your mom’s going to be OK, too. You’ll see.” Feeling stupid for saying it, but needing to. Then he’d given him to an EMT, who would take him to the hospital, just in case. And to his no-doubt frantic father, who hadn’t lost his wife that day. Or his son.

  That night, Jim had found himself on his knees beside his bed, his head in his hands. He’d tried to pray, to ask for the strength to make it through. And he’d ended up crying, muffling the tears in his palms so Mac wouldn’t hear.

  The low points didn’t come very often anymore, but they still came, dark and hopeless. And, as usual, he’d ended up talking to Maya instead of God.

  I can’t do this, babe, he’d tried to tell her. I can’t take it. While she’d been sick, he’d done everything he could to be her strong place, her steady place. And once she’d been gone, he’d realized how much she’d been that for him.

  Like always, he wasn’t sure God heard, but he could hear Maya, her voice weak and thready, but so sure in its resolve in those last days.

  You’re such a good dad, Jim. Such a good man. You’re my hero, and you can do this. You’re going to keep living hard and working hard and loving hard, and you’re going to come out on the other side. You’ll see.

  All right, maybe the past week hadn’t been completely normal. Or maybe it had. Some things he was grateful for, and some things he’d have given anything to change. Some good times and some hard times. His life.

  Just like right now, he was holding a schedule that had a name on it he wasn’t expecting and telling Mac, “Your long-term substitute is Hallie Cavanaugh.”

  “She just came on Monday,” Mac said, focusing on her dinner again. “And she didn’t say her first name. They never do. They just write, ‘Ms. Cavanaugh,’ like ‘Ms.’ is their first name. Like I used to think yours was ‘Sarge.’”

  “You did not. Your mother called me ‘Jim.’”

  “I thought ‘Sarge’ was your other first name. When I was little.”

  “Quit trying to change the subject. Why didn’t you tell me your long-term sub was Hallie?”

  “Maybe because I’ve never met her, so I didn’t recognize her?” Mac said sweetly. “Or because you didn’t tell me she was my uncle’s sister? That she had the same dad as Cole? Which makes her my aunt.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Why did everybody keep trying to make Hallie a member of Jim’s family? “Who told you that?”

  “Cole. Well, not exactly,” she amended. “I heard him talking on the phone about it, so I asked Grandma.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Mackenzie.” He gave her a hard look, and she sighed and said, “Well, maybe because . . . Cole said something that sounded weird. About you and her.”

  “Uh-huh. What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  Great. How did he explain this? About her teacher? He said, “I’m guessing he was talking about a strange part of Hallie’s father’s will. Her father—well, Cole’s father, too—knew me growing up, and he didn’t like me. I’m guessing Cole probably said something about how I wasn’t supposed to . . . spend time with Hallie.”

  Mac gave him a pretty good side-eye. “That wasn’t it.”

  “Well, what he probably actually said isn’t appropriate for me to discuss with you. You don’t need to worry about what he said. Hallie—Ms. Cavanaugh—is in town for a few more months, and I guess she’ll be your teacher until Christmas. She’s good friends with Aunt Anthea, so you’ll probably see her around, and so will I. And that is all.”

  “Do you want a girlfriend?” Mac asked, and Jim about dropped his fork.

  “Why?” he asked cautiously.

  She shrugged. “I just wondered.”

  “I might. Would that bother you?”

  She got up and took her plate to the sink, scraped it off, then put it in the dishwasher. She wasn’t looking at him when she said, “Honor Campbell says that men have to have sex, or they could explode.”

  A sip of Jim’s water went down the wrong way, and he had to do some coughing. He finally said, “Who told Honor Campbell that?”

  “Her sister Janice. She’s fifteen.”

  “Well, Janice is
wrong. And so is Honor. You can tell her I said so. Men don’t have to have sex. Teenage boys tell girls that to make them feel guilty for not wanting to have sex. Teenage boys are mostly jerks.”

  At least Mac was looking at him again. “You weren’t a jerk.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was.” He probably shouldn’t say that, or maybe he should. He never knew the right answer. “That’s how I know. Any boy who tells you he has to have sex, or it’ll be painful, or he’ll . . . explode, or whatever—there’s your red flag that he doesn’t really care about you.”

  Geez. Mac was eleven. This talk was supposed to happen when she was . . . fourteen. Or thirty. Not now, anyway.

  “Does that mean you’re not going to get a girlfriend?”

  “Uh . . .” Once again, he wasn’t sure of the right answer, so he went for honesty. “No, it doesn’t. Your mom’s been gone for more than two years. I miss her like crazy and I’ll love her forever, but I’ll probably get a girlfriend, one of these days. You can love more than one person in your life.”

  He hadn’t thought so at first, no matter what Maya had said. Sometime in the last months, though, he’d started to think it might be possible. And sometime in the last weeks, he’d started to think it could actually happen.

  Mac crossed her arms and leaned back against the counter. “Crystal’s mom likes you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Crystal said. Her mom was telling somebody on the phone. That you were so hot. And you had a great butt.” She rolled her eyes. “Gross.”

  Jim wished people in Paradise would make their damn phone calls with the door closed once in a while. “Well, I don’t know about that. I think my butt’s fairly normal. But sooner or later, I’ll go out with a woman.”

  “To have sex?”

  That took Jim a minute. “None of your business,” he finally said, which wasn’t exactly a parental answer, so he tried again. “Not something I’m going to talk to you about. There’ll be somebody I like, and I’ll get to know her, and I’ll . . . date.”

  Date. It even sounded weird. He hadn’t dated for a long time.

  What do you call that lunch with Hallie? his mind mocked.

  Lunch, he answered, and his mind said, Ha. Even his mind back-talked him.

  “Will you ask me first?” Mac said.

  “No,” Jim said, going for honesty again. “But I’ll let you know.”

  Mac was giving him the side-eye again. “What if I hate her? What if you get married and I have a stepmother and I hate her?”

  “I’m not going to marry somebody you hate.”

  “But if you’re not going to ask me if I like her, how will you know?”

  “Trust me, I’ll know.” He got up and put his own plate in the dishwasher. “I’m going to be late to this thing.”

  “First period is PE,” she said. “I’m good at PE, and it doesn’t matter for my future anyway. You can miss it.”

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  World Geography was seventh period, so Jim had all evening to get used to the idea. All the same, when he walked into the classroom at eight thirty, it was still a shock.

  He’d had a class in this room himself, he was pretty sure. Hallie had been in it, too.

  This Hallie looked a little different. She waited at the front of the room as the parents filed in and sat at those too-small desks, which fortunately had been replaced in the past twenty years, so any swear words written or carved into their undersides at least hadn’t been put there by Jim.

  Luke and Kayla Jackson were up in the front row, and Hallie was perched with one hip on the teacher’s desk, chatting to them. Wearing a long, drapey, peacock-blue top over cream-colored leggings and low brown boots, and looking fine.

  Well, no, he decided as he sat beside Luke. Looking a little tired. But then, it was the end of the evening.

  She glanced his way, smiled, then went on talking to Kayla. Cool, just like in the restaurant. Professional. In her element.

  In the next fifteen minutes, she was even more so. She explained what had happened to Charlene Bailey, for those who hadn’t heard, gave an update on her progress, and outlined her own background, which was pretty damn impressive.

  “Even though I’m filling in here,” she told them, “I can promise you that your children won’t be losing any learning time. Fortunately, Ms. Bailey left thorough lesson plans, and I’ll be supplementing with some ideas of my own. Sixth grade is an exciting time. Your sons and daughters are thinking more critically, and they’re ready to share those thoughts, so we’ll be having class discussions that I expect to get lively at times. I’ve been here four days,” she said with a wry smile, “and I can tell you that they already have. Our unit now, as you may know, is the Middle East. Our focus will always be on understanding the cultural, economic, and geographic forces that have shaped a region, which may mean that your kids will arrive home with ideas and questions that might startle you. But that’s all part of learning to think for themselves.”

  “You going to be teaching them that terrorism’s part of their culture?” asked Charlie Roundtree from the back row. He was a couple years older than Jim, but Jim remembered him just fine. Charlie Roundtree, the brother of Kyle Roundtree, the guy Jim had punched in the stomach on Paradise Mountain a few years back, when he’d grabbed Hallie and tried to pull her into the woods.

  Man, small towns could be murder.

  “We’ll be doing some reading and discussion on the roots of Muslim extremism,” Hallie said. If she remembered Charlie, she wasn’t letting on. “Our goal in this class is understanding the forces that are shaping the world your sons and daughters will be living in.”

  “We don’t do multiculturalism in Paradise,” a thin, intense woman with a head of frizzy brown hair said, to a murmur of agreement.

  “Then you may want to talk to Mr. Van Buren about applying for an exemption from this class for your child on the basis of personal beliefs,” Hallie said calmly. “Because the Idaho standards for sixth grade World Geography and Cultures are all about the study of—well, world cultures. I’d be happy to share a copy with you. But I suspect that your children’s main complaint is going to be that they have to write too much.”

  “Already heard that,” Luke put in with his patented grin. “And you won’t get any complaints from me.”

  “Of course you’d be on her side,” Ms. Frizzy-Hair said. “We all know that teachers stick together, and that the state is telling you to push its agenda.”

  “Doesn’t sound to me like there’s a side,” Jim said. Enough was enough. “Sounds like Ms. Cavanaugh’s got a curriculum she’s supposed to follow, and she’s following it. Which would be what she’s paid to do. It’s her fourth day, folks. Maybe give her a break.”

  “We know why you’re saying that, too,” Charlie said.

  About half of the room held its breath, with the other half—the parents who were connected to the university and not tuned in to the Paradise gossip network—merely looking confused. Jim swung around in the cramped seat, looked across the rows of parents at Charlie, and said, “If you’ve got something to say to me, I’m happy to talk to you afterwards. This isn’t the time or the place.”

  Hallie held up a hand and said, “Excuse me,” with authority in her voice that Jim had never heard. Jim swung back around, and she said, “The good news is, we’ll be moving on to sub-Saharan Africa next. And while that has its own set of fascinating issues, they’re less politically charged. In any case, I hope you can see why our class discussions may get lively, and why we’ll be stressing courteous discussion that keeps to the topic.” She pointed to a poster on the wall headed Ground Rules for Discussion. “I have some copies up here that I’d be happy to share.” She looked at the back row when she said it, and she didn’t get any lip, so Jim assumed Charlie had gotten the message. She looked like she was all ready to send him to the principal’s office. She’d probably do it, too.

  The bell rang, and she said, “Thank you all for coming.
My e-mail address and phone number are on the board if you have further questions.”

  Jim didn’t go outside to talk to Charlie Roundtree. The conversation he wanted to have with him mostly came in the form of a fist, which wouldn’t be too helpful. Besides, he kind of wanted to stick around here. So he said good-bye to Luke and Kayla, stayed where he was, tried to think of what to say, and started with, “I didn’t realize Eli had this class with Mac.”

  “Yes,” Hallie said. “I didn’t realize that Eli was Luke’s stepson until tonight. He’s a nice boy. Sits behind Mac, in fact.”

  “He bother her?” Jim asked. When Hallie looked surprised, he said, “I was remembering. We had a class in this room, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We did. You didn’t sit behind me, though.”

  “Nope. But somebody else did. Can’t remember who anymore. He was always pulling your hair, and you’d turn red and get upset, and everybody would laugh.”

  She got busy behind the desk, packing up, and Jim realized that she must have been here since early morning. “I remember that.”

  “I was remembering it, too,” he said. “Tonight. Wondering why that was OK with anybody at all. Why a boy would be allowed to put his hands on a girl like that and harass her. If anybody did that to Mac now, I’d be all over it.”

  “And so would I.” She shoved her laptop into a fabric bag. “So would Mac. She’s got plenty of confidence. So would Eli, for that matter. He sits behind her, like I said. But, yes. That was Eric somebody, with the hair. Probably in prison now. One day, we had a substitute. Eric did that hair thing, whispered something about my other hair, which I didn’t even figure out for a couple more years, but . . . man, I’d had it. I was holding a really sharp pencil, and I turned around and stabbed him in the hand. Hard. Bet I punched right through the skin. He let out this wail and told the teacher, and she said, ‘It looked to me like you deserved it.’” She sighed. “That was a great day. That was when I first wanted to be a teacher. It was a little thing, but it sure made an impression.”

  “So did you, tonight.” He was smiling. That had been a good story. “Walk you out to your car?”