Sunday, it was mighty chilly around the town house. Yvette flounced around and for once, Sherry didn’t try to make peace. By Monday, she was actually reconsidering her mother’s suggestions. On a scale of one to ten, dating Garrett earned a four. She assigned a lowly one to going out with other men she’d met through intercampus committee work. And the farmers in the community tended to want wives willing to stay on the farm, which she wasn’t.
That afternoon at the staff meeting Garrett blew the first proposition right out of the water—not that it had ever really been viable.
The sneaky man met each staff member at the door with a handshake and his killer smile. He’d even bought doughnuts to go with a fresh pot of coffee he’d heisted from Sherry’s department, which earned him extra points with the staff.
Sherry took a seat in the back of the room. Thinking of Lock in other than a strictly professional way caused her to feel giddy. Sort of unbalanced.
Everyone else acted relaxed. They munched doughnuts and listened to Garrett toss out solutions to their concerns. Sherry’s mouth was full when he moved to item two on his agenda—and drove a knife through her heart.
“I have here a request from the board of regents. Mandate, I guess you might say,” he offered with a shrug. “They want us to spend more time on academic counseling and phase out time spent on students’ personal and social deficiencies.”
Sherry jumped up, gagging on the doughnut she couldn’t swallow. She whirled on colleagues who suddenly acted as if she didn’t exist. “Where’s your backbone?” she demanded. “We spent two years getting Kruger to at least ride the fence with regards to whole-life counseling for students who have precious little impetus to attend class. Maybe you’re all willing to let this metropolitan cowboy waltz in and set our program back fifty years. I’m not.” She thumbed herself in the chest so hard, tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m not,” she repeated, a quaver creeping into her voice. Before she lost her composure altogether and embarrassed herself with tears, Sherry scooped up her things and fled the room.
In the hall, with the door safely closed between her and the dean, she gulped in air, hating to admit that she more than half expected Garrett to stop her mad flight.
He didn’t. Sherry squared her shoulders and strode purposefully past the cubicles where secretaries typed furiously with their heads bent. It occurred to her then that she might have committed a grave error in judgment. Back a new broom into a corner and he had no choice but to sweep his way out. So what if one insignificant department chairperson got caught in the debris?
She sighed as she let herself into her office. From the interviews she should’ve seen that Lock, unlike Kruger, wasn’t a fence rider. He acted. He’d also called the entire division together. Something his predecessor had avoided like the plague. Good grief. She’d let her temper override good sense again.
She glanced up eagerly as a tap sounded on her door. Through the frosted glass she saw Angel’s outline, not Garrett’s.
“Come in.”
Angel crossed the room and shoved a cup of steaming coffee into Sherry’s hands. “Not like you to hide under a rock, boss. Scuttlebutt says the new dean clipped your wings.”
Sherry accepted the cup, mouth turned down. “Who said? How?” She waved a hand as if to say, Don’t bother explaining.
“You asking how I know what happened behind closed doors?” Angel winked. “I have my sources, boss.”
“I should have guessed.” Sherry lifted her cup in salute. “It pains me to ask, but what went on after I left? Did the dean blast me with both barrels?”
“That’s the part I don’t get.” Angel rolled innocent-looking eyes. “He just went on to the next agenda item. They’re up to number six.”
Sherry took a seat behind her desk, a faint frown forming between her brows. “Can you lay your hands on a copy of his agenda?”
“Ta-da!” Angel pulled a scrunched paper from her jacket pocket. After smoothing the page, she offered it to Sherry.
Sherry’s lips twitched. “You are amazing. Devious but amazing.”
“I give you permission to put the amazing part on my next evaluation. Leave off the devious bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Evals? Didn’t we just do them?” Sherry’s muscles tensed at the dark thought of who’d be doing her performance evaluation. Garrett Lock.
Angel hesitated. “Lock’s secretary is typing names on the forms even as we speak. They’ll be on his desk by noon waiting for his memo.”
Sherry groaned.
“Aren’t you glad you have tenure?” Angel said cheekily, speeding out and closing the door on her ear-to-ear grin.
It forced a smile from Sherry in spite of herself. Angel was right, though, when she’d said Sherry usually didn’t run from a battle. Before she’d finished her coffee, Sherry opened her door wide and dug into the million and one tasks that befell her as teacher, counselor and department chair. She dictated the case notes she hadn’t gotten to the previous night and handed Angel the tape on her way to her ten-o’clock intermediate psychology class. Her route took her down the corridor, past the room where the meeting had been held. It had just broken up. No one spoke, and the brief glimpse Sherry had of Garrett showed him surrounded by staff. Female staff. Be that as it may, she owed him another apology. She could do that—even if there were several issues on his agenda she took exception to. During the break between classes, she practiced sounding properly repentant.
Her fifty-minute class stretched to an hour. Then she got tied up helping a new student straighten out a computer glitch in her schedule. Sherry didn’t get back to her office until two. Garrett’s office was dark, so she approached his secretary.
“He left campus after receiving a call from his son’s school.”
“Is Keith sick?”
“I really can’t say.” The woman’s icy tone said she wouldn’t pass on the information even if she did know.
“If he gets back before three, will you tell him I’d like a word with him?”
The woman nodded, although she plugged her earphones in without writing anything down.
Sherry tried to connect with him again at three-thirty. This time his secretary was away from her desk. When Sherry let herself into her own office, she discovered why. A memo requesting that she make an appointment for her evaluation had been shoved under her door. Kruger had always put off doing evals until the president’s secretary rapped his knuckles. Lock obviously had no compunction about rating a staff he barely knew.
She never caught up with Garrett. The next day, she counseled in the Hub. Efforts to reach him by phone during her few breaks didn’t pan out. She didn’t leave messages because she was hardly in her office and wasn’t in the mood for hours of telephone tag. She would never have approached Kruger at home, but she would’ve talked to Lock if either he or Keith had been around the two evenings she went off to skate.
Yvette, too, was conspicuously absent. A logical assumption might be that the three were together. A possibility that depressed Sherry. These days, even colleagues avoided her on campus. If staff sided with Lock, she’d never win the battle to expand whole-life training services.
By Friday Sherry had given up hope of seeing Garrett. Midafternoon, with Angel gone to a secretaries’ meeting, Sherry answered the department phone on the third ring and was shocked to hear Garrett asking to speak with her.
“This is me,” she squeaked. “Angel is out and I don’t know what happened to our student helpers,” she said in a long breathless blur.
“You and I have passed like the hare and the turtle in a footrace all week,” he drawled in the slow molasses way that always melted every last shred of Sherry’s composure. “I think we need to set up an appointment to talk.”
“Sure.” Sherry tripped over her tongue agreeing. “Anytime. You name it.”
> She heard him flipping his calendar. “How about now?”
“On my way.”
Garrett stepped to the door of his office to greet her.
As Sherry didn’t hear the click of any computer keys, she assumed his support staff had gone to the same meeting as Angel. Digging a notebook out of her briefcase, she perched on the edge of the leather chair Garrett indicated—one of three grouped at the other end of his office. She’d a whole lot rather have had his desk between them. But she could hardly refute his choice of the more informal conversation area.
After taking a deep breath, she plunged right into the apology she’d spent the week polishing. “I’m sorry I walked out of the staff meeting, Dean Lock. A department chair should set a better example.”
He waited and she fidgeted—she wouldn’t apologize for defending her position in favor of whole-life training. He studied her so long and with such intensity that she eventually scraped a nervous hand through her short hair, making it stand in spikes.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not really sorry about anything?” he asked.
She hadn’t expected such a frank statement and so had nothing to say.
“Truth is, you make a pressure cooker look calm, Sherilyn. Don’t ever run out on me again after slinging manure. I need ammo to take back to the board. Testimony from law enforcement, women’s shelters or from your students’ employers. The regents don’t want to reduce services at the Hub. They want to scrap the program altogether.”
She looked stricken. “Since we’re being honest, I’ll tell you why I left. Sometimes when I get mad I cry. Men expect that of a woman. I was afraid it would hang me and negate anything I said.”
“Fair enough.” He pondered, then discarded the notion of telling her he considered tears a human trait. He’d shed some at Keith’s birth and after Carla’s exit from their lives. But Sherry rushed on before he could. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been wise.
“I have another bone to pick,” she said. “Agenda item four regarding standardized competency-based assessment. The women who enter our work-study program through the Hub aren’t standard. It’s unfair to expect them to make any kind of showing compared to the skill levels of normal college students.”
“Eloquently put, Dr. Campbell. Did your spies tell you Jess Fowler made essentially the same point at the meeting?”
“Spies?” Sherry tongued a dry bottom lip.
Garrett glanced away, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Yes, spies,” he growled. “That’s a copy of my agenda you’re holding. I typed it on my computer and I thought there was only one copy.”
“You typed it? Then how did Angel— I mean, I assumed the secretary who typed it...well, I, ah, I do have my sources.” She resorted to Angel’s pat response.
“Never mind. It’s my fault for keeping Kruger’s computer password. I can see I need to change it before I start typing evaluations.”
“You type evals, too? Isn’t that a waste of expensive time?”
“You think I can’t type as fast as I can dictate?” He laughed. “Thank goodness your sources aren’t omnipotent. Guess they didn’t inform you I have two undergraduate degrees. One in sociology, the other in computer science.”
“I’m impressed. I keep meaning to take computer classes.”
“Well, I believe in staff development. I realize computer classes fill up fast, but if you find one you’d like to take and can get in, I’ll authorize the department to pay for it.”
“That’s very generous, considering the board ordered you to trim the budget.”
“Ouch. I said I’d cut fat. I didn’t promise to cut from the areas they pick.” He leaned back and tented his fingers. “Enough said. I have a fair idea of the general workings of the program for disadvantaged women. Fill me in on the exact steps. I’ll save questions for when you finish.” He rummaged for a yellow legal pad.
Sherry explained the lack of services for displaced homemakers in the original design. She listed classes she’d badgered them to add. Extra counseling. Child care on campus and whole-life training. “That’s what sets our program apart. Our success rate is more than double other similar programs.”
“Successful, but terribly expensive.”
“Compared to what? For the women referred to us from the penal system the alternative would be jail—and you know how much that costs the taxpayers. These women come with a load of baggage. Nine out of ten resent any form of authority. Three counselors brainstormed and designed a series of preliminary requirements that include courses on nutrition, self-esteem, grooming and interactive people skills. These are taken before we discuss academics. The board of regents thinks the extra classes are frivolous.”
“Have you had students from the program attend board meetings and explain how much the introductory classes mean?”
“Several times. And not just students from the penal system. We have physically challenged students whose self-esteem needs shoring up. We serve single mothers and divorcees of all ages. Most of them married before they graduated from high school and suddenly found themselves out on their ears with virtually no marketable skills.”
Garrett opened his mouth to interrupt when the phone shrilled.
Sherry let it go to the third ring, then just about knocked a funny clay pig paperweight off his desk in her attempt to snag it. The pig’s owner motioned her sharply back to her seat.
“There’s a student clerk filling in,” he said. “She’ll answer it. Now where were we?” The phone rang again, more insistently, as he shuffled notes.
Unable to let the call go unanswered, Sherry dove over Garrett’s desk. “Dean Lock’s office,” she said crisply and efficiently. She listened, then asked the party to hold. Covering the mouthpiece, she whispered, “It’s Keith’s day care. Do you want to take it or phone them back?”
Garrett looked startled, then grim. “I’ll take it.” He all but ripped the receiver from her hand. “This is Garrett Lock. My son did what? No, we do not have a dog!” Resting the phone on his shoulder, Garrett shut his eyes. “Why would the driver let him take some scruffy pup on the bus?”
Sherry wondered if she should slip out and give him privacy. She did her best to tune out his end of the conversation. Not easy, as his face grew red and the veins bulged above the collar of his white shirt. Before Sherry could decide whether to leave, he said goodbye and slammed the phone back in its cradle.
It appeared he’d forgotten her presence. Then his eyes lit on her, and he cleared his throat. “I have to go and take care of a matter that’s come up. I’d like to talk more about this. If it’s not an imposition, could you drop by the house tonight? Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask,” he said, noting her wary expression. “But we are neighbors. It seems absurd for both of us to drive back here.”
Still she hesitated. What if news of their cozy meeting got out? He was an eligible bachelor and she a single teacher. Exactly the juicy stuff rumormongers loved.
“Just say if you have plans. Really, I have to run. Keith found a stray dog. He told the bus driver it was his—that it followed him to school.”
“I don’t have plans,” Sherry said. Her need to convince him to save the Hub won out over what campus gossips might say. “What time is convenient?”
“Is eight or eight-thirty too late? This isn’t the first time Keith’s been in trouble at school and day care this week.” He sighed. “I think he needs more of my time right now. Even so, he’ll be in bed by eight-thirty.”
“Eight-thirty it is,” she said. “Go easy on him, huh? He talks a lot about wanting a dog. Spending last Saturday with Mark and Pilgrim probably made matters worse.”
“If I’ve explained the rules of the Home Association once, I’ve explained them twenty times. I hate to run out on you like this. Would you ask the student to log mes
sages?”
“Take off,” she said, shooing him with her hands. “I’ll turn out your lights, set the alarm and tell the staff.”
Grateful for her understanding, he thanked her again and dashed out.
She watched the swing of his broad shoulders and felt an uncommon tug on her heart. For Keith, she insisted, unconsciously running her fingers over Lock’s silly pig.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AN UNSCHEDULED COUNSELING appointment detained Sherry at work. Unusually heavy traffic further delayed her. It was nearly eight when she walked into the house and met her housemate who was already showered and dressed to go out.
“Where have you been?” Yvette railed without warning.
“At work. Why? Is there some emergency?”
Yvette snatched a DVD lying on the couch. “I rented this so you could entertain Garrett’s kid while we go out.”
“Tonight?” Sherry didn’t take the plastic case. “Yvette, if you and Garrett had a date, he didn’t remember.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m due at his place in half an hour to go over the details of one of our programs.”
“You sneak! I told you Garrett Lock is the man I want. How can you stab me in the back like this?”
“I didn’t. He set the meeting. And four months ago Tony Meyer was the man of your dreams. Darrell Bauer last fall. Kurt somebody before that. Anyway, if you’re serious this time, you should be including Keith in your outings.”
“A lot you know. The boy’s mother is making a big stink over custody. I didn’t get the whole story, but I heard Garrett talking to his lawyer. He moved here to appear more accommodating. You know she’ll win in the end. Judges always favor mothers. Garrett’s going to need consoling when he loses the fight.” She twisted a piece of hair. “I intend to be the one he turns to. So be a pal. Call him and cancel the meeting.”
Sherry wondered if the custody battle was why Keith had been acting out at school and day care. “Canceling isn’t up to me. He’s the boss. Besides, he said Keith would be in bed by eight-thirty. That wouldn’t allow time for a movie.”
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