“We just moved here from New Hampshire,” she explained. “He’s building a playhouse to auction as a project for his woodworking class, but he’ll need more hours than that. He’s very creative. I’m sure he’ll work hard for you, although he might need a little refresher about some of the crafts.”
I nodded and tried to mask my surprise. Woodworking was an eleventh-grade subject. I realized she must be considerably older than I had guessed. Yet here she was, about to have another baby. Better her than me, I thought. I was ready for a second shot at a lot of things in life, but mothering a newborn was not one of them.
“If you want to talk crafts, Judy’s your woman,” Dan told her, and patted me on the shoulder. I stiffened. “She can probably spin straw into gold.”
Vivienne grinned. “Is that a course at the Steiner teachers’ college?”
I twitched my shoulder out from his grasp. “If it was, he’d have me locked in the workshop right about now.”
He laughed, and I watched Vivienne Heath’s gaze shift from me to my boss and back again. Dan always upped his show of goodwill and camaraderie around me to compensate for the fact that we hated each other. Upon his arrival the previous year, it had quickly become clear that he thought I was a dinosaur excavated from Woodstock; I disdained him for being a bourgeois bohemian. The ideological tension ran deep even before I began having vivid dreams of coupling with him. Whatever uptight vibe Vivienne was observing could have come from either source.
“Speaking of the workshop,” said Dan, “he’s in there working right now. Perhaps you can drop in and say hello before you leave.”
“Of course.” I shouldered my purse and gave my classroom a final glance. “I’ll head over right now.”
“Thanks so much. I’m sure this will be a wonderful experience for him.” Vivienne turned her head and smiled at me. “Have you met my son? Zach Patterson?”
It dawned on me suddenly. The black hair and eyes. The faded, peachy tan. Barring the pregnant belly, the slender and neatly toned frame. I suppressed a groan.
“I have, as a matter of fact,” I said, impressed by my own composure. “He and my son are in the madrigal choir together. I brought him home the other day.”
She narrowed her eyes slightly. “He didn’t tell one of his Lewinsky jokes, did he?”
“He did.”
A sigh of disgust escaped her lips. “I apologize for that. If it’s the joke I think it is, he’s been telling it to his father’s employees, his uncles and even his grandfather. Quite the comedian, that one. He’s probably getting revenge on us for listening to too much NPR.”
“Maybe he finds it upsetting,” I suggested. “Losing faith in one’s leaders and all that. Maybe it’s his way of relieving the stress.”
She smirked and responded with a snorting little laugh. “You don’t know my son. He doesn’t have stress. He just wants to use dirty words in front of adults. It gives him a thrill.”
Beside me Dan shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, well,” I quickly added, “I’m pretty experienced with teenagers. I’m sure I’ll be able to keep him in line.”
I said goodbye to Dan and Vivienne and headed out in the direction of the workshop, taking the long route to avoid walking past Bobbie’s history classroom, now occupied by a young teacher who bore no resemblance to Bobbie in either looks or spirit. On the first day of school I had made the foolish decision to drop by and peek in. The sight of all those teenagers chatting and working and laughing, going on as though she had never been there, sent me into a spiral of depression so confounding that I spent all afternoon emptying dropperfuls of Bach’s homeopathic Rescue Remedy into my coffee. Since then I employed the methods of avoidance and repression to deal with my grief, and while I knew the conventional wisdom declared that this was a poor idea, it had always worked fine for me.
The bedraggled workshop building sat behind the school, an oversize shed in need of some serious love and exterior latex paint. Amish craftsmen had been contracted to build it ten years before; it had been trimmed and painted by the school’s juniors and seniors, and left unheated except for a woodstove they fed with scraps from student projects. That much I knew, because the underwriters had canceled the insurance on that building three years before unless we agreed to put in a heating system that complied with building code. The funds didn’t exist, and so the building survived on vigilance and hope.
I heard Zach Patterson before I saw him, crouched on the floor of the workshop beside a very loud saw. With safety glasses over his eyes and his shaggy black hair shielding his face, I would not have been certain it was him were it not for the backpack lying on the table, the initials ZXP drawn in big bold letters on the front pocket with a black marker. I wondered what the X stood for.
“Hi, Zach,” I yelled over the din of the saw, trying to start the partnership on a friendly note.
He looked up at me through a haze of sawdust and shut off the power. When he stood, he pushed the glasses onto his forehead, offering me a first good look beneath that mop of hair: unruly skin and inexpertly tended facial hair, rounded out by eyes a bit too large in proportion to the lean angles of his cheeks and jaw. What mothers call “the awkward stage” was slow in letting go of Zachary Patterson.
He extended his hand. “Thanks for the ride the other day, Mrs. McFarland.”
“You’re welcome. Your mother just dropped by to tell me I’ll be working with you on the bazaar. I didn’t make the connection between the two of you until our conversation was almost over.”
“That’s because she looks more Chinese than I do,” he said bluntly. “It throws everybody off.”
“I think it was the last name that threw me. I’ve seen your name on the Madrigals roster, so when she said she was a Heath, I didn’t put together that you were hers.”
He nodded. “It gets more confusing when you meet my dad. He’s blond and really tall, so nobody ever thinks I’m his kid, even though I’ve got his last name. Then they expect my mom to have a Chinese-sounding name and think my dad must be the Heath. It happens all the time.”
I smiled politely. “That’s the modern family for you, I guess.”
He returned my smile with a grin of his own. “Yep. The obscuring of ancient wisdom.”
“What do you mean?”
I had taken the bait. “Steiner said the mixing of the races obscures the ancient wisdom. You can blame my parents for that.”
I closed my eyes for a long moment. “Steiner never said that.”
“He did, but it’s okay. He was a product of his time. And so am I.” Pulling his glasses back down, he rearranged the plank of wood in his hands and asked, “Did you need me for something?”
“I just wanted to discuss the expectations for your service hour credits. I’m not sure if you’ll fill all thirty hours, but I can find as much work for the bazaar as you’re willing to do. Painting, assembling booths, pricing crafts, you name it.”
“Got it,” he said. He sank back to his haunches and aligned the board in front of the sawblade. “Whore myself out until the school says I’m done. I can handle it.”
I glowered at his back. He was like a mouthier, less easily punished version of Scott. I hitched my purse onto my shoulder and said, “Well, I’ll be away for the weekend, but let me know if you need any assistance.”
“Where are you going?”
The personal question took me aback. “To the Blue Ridge Mountains with my husband for our anniversary.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “I like the mountains. It’s weird to live in a place that doesn’t have them. When you look outside it’s like your eyes don’t know where to rest. There’s no anchor. It’s just emptiness. It sucks.”
He was right. Maybe that explained why I felt the way I did. Lately the sense nagged at me that a nascent dark thing was coming, and that, as my midwife had once said, there was no way out of this thing but through it. But perhaps it was simpler than all that. A matter of finding an easy place to rest one
’s eyes, and with them, one’s thoughts.
I smiled at him, and, in an abashed, close-lipped way, he smiled back.
Review
“[An] enthralling read … recommended for fans of Jodi Picoult’s realistic, ethics-driven novels.”
—Library Journal, starred review for The Kingdom of Childhood
“The Kingdom of Childhood raises messy and controversial questions, making it a natural pick for book clubs. Coleman does not demand sympathy for her main character, and in fact, Judy’s break from reality and obscured moral barometer stokes the tension even further…. Coleman writes with a flair for capturing the underbelly of the human psyche and the all-consuming nature of desire.”
—BookPage (5-star review)
“Coleman creates a stark psychological drama in this charged story… it’s dark, fast-moving, and nicely creepy.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Kingdom of Childhood
“[A] sure-to-be-controversial… gutsy debut novel. Nimbly exploring such hot-button issues as the abuse of power, betrayal of trust, and predatory nature of sexual obsession, it is poised to generate major book-group buzz.”
—Booklist on The Kingdom of Childhood
“The Kingdom of Childhood had me hooked from the first line. It’s gripping, upsetting, thought-provoking, and beautifully written, the kind of book you’ll want to talk about with everyone you know.”
—Eleanor Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters
“Wow, what a book! The story just spirals and I completely got caught up in the madness.”
—Carol Fitzgerald, BookReporter
“In Rebecca Coleman’s entrancing debut, the scars of one woman are slowly revealed as she weaves memories from childhood over present day, like a stitch poorly attempting to sew over the truth of her own past. Intoxicating and surprising, Coleman has crafted a novel that is as astounding as it is unforgettable. This must-read will haunt the reader long after the story has leapt from the page.”
—Examiner.com
About the Author
Rebecca Coleman received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Maryland at College Park and speaks to writers’ groups on the subjects of creative writing and publishing. A native New Yorker, she now lives and works near Washington, D.C. Visit her at www.RebeccaColeman.net.
Copyright
ISBN: 9781459241176
Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Coleman
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
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Heaven Should Fall Page 33