Curse of the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Absolutely. They’re a little jumpy, that’s all. Things will get back to normal before we know it.”

  “So you’re not mad at me?”

  Her voice was small. Her whole attitude of shame and self-doubt was so uncharacteristic that I started to wonder if she was getting sick. “Not a bit.”

  “Claudia sure seemed mad.”

  “And you’ve cared about her feelings since when?”

  Her laugh sounded startled, as if I’d surprised her into doing something she hadn’t expected to do. “I should care about them, I suppose. If I were a truly good person. Like you.”

  Oh, please. “If I were truly good, I wouldn’t be wishing that Claudia would move to a different school district.”

  “Hey, here’s an idea.” She hopped over a crack in the sidewalk. “Let’s gather up information on other school systems and send them to her anonymously.” She started to talk about a magnet school she’d read about in Oregon. “It’d be perfect for her middle son, you know, Tyler. Or is Taylor the middle one? Taynor’s the oldest. I think.”

  She went on to espouse the virtues of experimental education for other people’s children. I nodded, smiling, listening as much to her tone of voice as to her words. She might worry about her self-created and nonexistent curse tomorrow, but for now she was happy.

  After I’d tucked the kids into bed, I went downstairs to the study to jot down some notes about the next PTA meeting. Or, more specifically, how to make sure attendance at the next meeting returned to normal.

  I sat in front of the computer and found a notepad. Underneath an Oliver doodle of Spot—at least that’s what I thought it was—I started writing. “E-mail Debra O’Connor.” A bank vice president would be a credible person to spread the word that the so-called curse was one of Marina’s jokes. “Talk to Flossie.” Another ideal noncurse believer. “Talk to Ruthie.” If the owner of the most popular diner in town couldn’t convince people that curses didn’t exist, no one could.

  There were other people who might be influential, but I’d start with those three and see what happened. With any luck, this would all blow over in a week or two.

  I sat back. Was believing in luck in the same category as believing in a curse?

  “Different,” I said out loud, startling George. The black cat had come in to sit on my lap, and my voice had woken him out of his sound sleep. “Sorry, guy.”

  It took a few pets, but he settled back down into a purr. “Now what do I do?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. I’d intended on doing a few chores before getting into bed with a library copy of the latest Sarah Addison Allen book, but now there was a cat on my lap.

  Well, there was always e-mail to read.

  I skimmed the thirty or so e-mails in my inbox. Deleted most of them, read a few, answered a couple. Scrunched my face at the ones from people who wanted to hear all about the incident at the funeral home.

  “Not going to happen,” I murmured, and deleted those, too.

  I sat there, thinking about PTAs and Dennis and death and finances and, on impulse, went to his company’s website.

  There was a nicely worded notice about the death of the company’s founder, a commitment to carry on, and a photo montage featuring Dennis at varying ages. I endured that for a few pictures, then clicked to another page. This one discussed the different ways in which Halpern and Company could help your financial portfolio. The next page—and its associated subpages—went on at length about the different financial vehicles available to their customers.

  My eyes went glassy somewhere in the middle of a description of asset-backed securities (“a type of debt security collateralized by specific assets”), and I moved on to a page titled “Investing 101,” which turned out to be a lecture series Dennis had put together. The entire series had been videotaped and was available online.

  “What You Always Wanted to Know About Investing But Were Afraid to Ask,” was lecture number one. “Good title,” I told George. “Don’t you think?” He didn’t answer, but his purring did seem to grow a little louder.

  My index finger hovered over the mouse. Did I really want to do this? No. Was I being a coward if I didn’t? Yes. Was there anything wrong with being a coward? I hesitated. George stood to rearrange himself, bumping my elbow in the process, making my finger touch the mouse hard enough to start the video.

  “Good evening,” Dennis said. The camera focused on his smiling, affable face, panned out to a roomful of people, then came back to Dennis. “Tonight,” he said, “I’m going to answer all your questions.” He put on a thoughtful look. “No, let me be more specific. Tonight I’m going to answer your finance-oriented questions. The easy ones. We’ll do the hard ones some other time. I stayed up late to watch the football game and I’m not up to anything too difficult.”

  For a minute, maybe two, I watched as Dennis alternately charmed and informed his audience. In that video he was still living, still breathing, still laughing and talking and thinking and assuming he had years left to him.

  Then I shut off the computer, picked up the sleeping cat, and went up to bed.

  • • •

  The next day was Sara’s day at the store. Thursday was an odd day for her to have free, I’d thought when she’d told me her schedule, but what did I know about course schedules for science majors? My major at Northwestern had been journalism, and j-school majors rarely ventured into the realm of chemistry and physics and biology. Psychology, maybe, but that was different.

  Lois, Yvonne, and I were at the front counter discussing the fall event schedule when Sara rushed in, red-faced and out of breath. “See? I told you.” She grinned at us.

  Yvonne, since she’d had the day off last time Sara worked, looked puzzled. I looked at Lois. Lois looked at me. Today Lois was appearing downright staid and almost stolid in a below-the-knee black skirt and white blouse. The only hint of personality showing was in her pendant necklace. A bright red miniature high-top basketball sneaker. She’d started to whisper about leopard-print underwear, but I’d cut her off at the description of the narrowness of the thong.

  “Told us what?” I asked Sara.

  “That I wouldn’t be late ever again.”

  Ah. Right. I glanced at my watch. “You’re actually ten minutes early, which completely absolves you of your two earlier minutes of lateness.”

  “It was three,” she said. “I don’t want to take advantage, or anything.”

  And yet you so often heard that today’s youth had no work ethic.

  Lois sniffed loudly. “Kids today. When I was your age, you wouldn’t have caught me coming into work early. Ever.”

  I pushed a box of tissues at her. “You don’t come into work early now.”

  “Old habits die hard.” She pushed the box back. “And here’s Sara coming in long before she needs to. I tell you, she’s well on the way to establishing a habit of a lifetime. Nip this in the bud, child. Nip it in the bud, otherwise you’re dooming yourself to a life of sweat and labor and toil.”

  Sara giggled. “But I don’t mind working hard. Really I don’t.”

  “Hard work feels good,” Yvonne said. “You sleep better if you’ve put in an honest day’s work.”

  And she should know. Yvonne had spent a number of years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Freed now for more than a year, she was still grateful for the low-paying, benefit-less job I’d been happy to give her. Her depth of knowledge regarding picture books was, as far as we could tell, bottomless, and her ability to match customer to book was almost frightening in its accuracy. I liked her very much and hoped she’d never leave.

  Lois shook her head, sighing. “You three make me want to run off and play hooky.”

  I pointed in the direction of the workroom. “Before or after you unpack the new graphic novel releases?”

  Her face lit up. “They’re here?” She scrabbled in a drawer for the box cutter and practically ran to the back of the store.

  There was a short pause whil
e we watched the supposedly work-allergic Lois whoop with excitement as she sliced open the boxes. “Here’s the new Matt Phelan. And Vera Brosgol’s latest. And Nate Powell. And you did order that one about the Louvre! This is just gorgeous . . .”

  Yvonne and Sara and I smiled at each other. Then the bells on the front door jingled, and the day’s business began in earnest.

  • • •

  The morning passed quickly. A steady stream of customers combined with the regular ringing of the phone kept us all busy until noon. I sent Sara, who was looking a trifle pale, off to lunch first. “I brought mine,” she said. “Is it okay if I eat in the workroom?”

  “Of course it is. And take a full hour. Read that new Elise Broach book. Start the new Rick Riordan. Take a nap. Just don’t come back for an hour.”

  “You know, for a mean old slave-driving boss, you’re not so bad.”

  I shooed her off. “I don’t want to see you for sixty straight minutes,” I called after her.

  Halfway into her prescribed hour, I poked my head into the workroom. Sara was sitting in a metal folding chair that I knew for a fact to be remarkably uncomfortable, head down and hand moving. Her hand held a mechanical pencil, and I was pretty sure she was working on her chemistry lab, but since the papers scattered across the table were scribbled with numbers and equations, she could have been calculating the mass of the earth, for all I knew.

  I watched her for a moment. Did her parents know how hard this child worked? Were they proud of her? Did they rush to hug her when she came home for vacations? I hoped so; I sincerely hoped so.

  • • •

  Halfway through the afternoon, there was a lull in customers and phone calls. Lois zoomed back to the graphic novels and Yvonne opened the software documentation no one had yet read. I looked around. There she was, sitting on the floor in front of the early readers, alphabetizing. Those books seemed to unalphabetize themselves as soon as you turned your back.

  I called to her. “Sara, why don’t you take a break? It’s a beautiful afternoon. Go for a walk.” As in, get outside before you fade away from lack of vitamin D. As in, get some exercise because sitting over books is sapping your muscle tone and giving your shoulders a pronounced curve that isn’t permanent yet, but might be if you continue like this much longer.

  “Oh, can I?” She put her hands on the floor and pushed herself to her feet. “That’d be awesome, Mrs. K. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. I promise.” She bounded like a two-legged blond gazelle to the workroom.

  So, not a walk, but another bout of studying.

  I went to my office and sat down. Fingered a stack of catalogs. Flipped through a stack of invoices. Picked up a roll of postage stamps. Tightened it, then released it, listening to the whispery flutter as it uncoiled.

  If Sara were my daughter, how would I feel? Would I be doing anything differently?

  Tightened. Released. Tightened. Released.

  Truly, there was only one thing to do. I stood and went to the workroom. Sara had a monstrously thick textbook flopped open in front of her, and her hand was busy writing notes into a spiral notebook. Her eyes were going back and forth faster than seemed possible for total reading comprehension, and she was muttering as she read.

  “Inhibitors of mRNA synthesis. Yeah, I remember. And if an adenoma shows a bigger release of aldosterone out of the adrenal gland, you can expect . . .” She frowned. “You can expect . . .”

  I knocked on the doorjamb.

  “Oh, wow, I’m sorry.” Sara jumped to her feet. “Is my break over? I’m really sorry. I’ll get back to work right away.”

  I unfolded a chair and sat down across the table from her. “Sit a minute.”

  “Sorry about the mess.” She piled up her books and papers and pencils and started shoving them into her backpack. “I really am.”

  “Sara.” Gently, I pulled the backpack away from her. “Sit. Please.”

  “Um.” She looked longingly at the bag and sat down slowly. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  “Why on earth would I be mad?” A new thought popped into my head. “No, I take that back. I am a little angry.” Her head dropped. All I could see of her face was the unlined, pale skin of her forehead. This was going to be a difficult conversation, and I had no idea where to start. “What is an adenoma, anyway?”

  “It’s when you get a tumor of a gland. You know, like the pituitary gland?”

  One more thing I didn’t want to know anything about. You only knew about diseases like that if you were intimately involved with them. Ergo, I didn’t want to know.

  “Are you studying for a test?” I asked.

  “Kind of.” She pushed at her hair. “The MCATs. Since I didn’t know for a year that I wanted to do premed, I’m a year behind in taking the MCATs. There’s one more test in September and maybe there will be some open slots in the med schools, so if I do really, really good, I won’t lose any time. I mean, my mom and dad say I could do with a year off, go work at a doctor’s office or something, but I’m already a year back, and if I can catch up, that’d be so great.” She stopped, having either run out of words or breath. I wasn’t certain which.

  Old memories were slowly bubbling to the surface. MCAT. The Medical College Admission Test. The bête noire of many a premed student. Doing well on the MCAT is considered essential to getting into medical school and so creates a tremendous stressor for test takers.

  “Is that what you’re doing?” I poked at her backpack. “Studying for your MCAT?”

  “Yeah. This is a great study guide.” She pulled out the soft-covered textbook and thumped it on the table. The beast must have been a thousand pages long. “It’s not as good as taking one of those tutoring courses, but those cost so much money. I mean like thousands. I’m doing pretty good on the practice exams, so I should do okay.” She made the end of a sentence more of a question than a statement: “. . . I should do okay?”

  I wanted to reassure her that she’d do fine. At the same time, I wanted to tell her that acing the MCAT didn’t matter, that she could always take it again, that she didn’t need to try so hard, that her parents were right, that taking a year off would be good for her, that resting for a year before heading off to the rigors of medical school might be the best thing for her. I wanted to tell her all of that, but I knew she wouldn’t listen to any of it.

  “Sara.” I sighed. How was I going to say this? “You’re going to make yourself sick, working so hard. That’s why you were crying the other day, isn’t it? You’re wearing yourself to a frazzle, trying to do everything.”

  “It’s just until I’m done with the MCATs,” she said earnestly. “After that, I’ll be okay.”

  “And what happens when you hit mid-terms? And finals?”

  Her head went down again. “I can do it,” she whispered.

  “Yes, you can,” I said. “But you shouldn’t.” I pushed Sara’s backpack toward her. “Go home.”

  She blinked at me. “But I’m scheduled to work until close.”

  “Not anymore you’re not.”

  “I’m . . . not sure what you mean.”

  “Sara, sweetheart, you need to quit working here.”

  “No!” Her eyes went wide, showing all white around the blue irises. “I love this store. I love everyone here and the books and the town and . . . and everything. I love working here, it makes me happy. I don’t want to quit. Ever.”

  “Then you’re fired.”

  Her lips trembled. “You mean, fired, fired? Like it’ll have to be on my job applications?”

  I sighed. “Of course not. I want you to stay, but I also think you’re going to work yourself into exhaustion. This is a part-time job that doesn’t pay you half of what you’re worth. You’re headed to medical school. What’s more important, studying for the MCAT or working here?”

  “But working here isn’t like working. It’s more like . . . fun.” Her eyes pleaded with me. Let me stay, keep me on, don’t make me leave.

&n
bsp; I reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Go home. Study. Get a good score on your MCAT. Get good grades this semester. Then, if you still want to, come back at Christmas.”

  “Oh, Mrs. K.” Sara lurched forward and hugged me. “You’re the nicest boss ever.”

  Tears stung my eyes. I wasn’t that nice, not really, but it was kind of her to say so. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  She sniffed. “Can I really come back after the semester’s over?”

  “I’ll be counting on it.”

  Chapter 9

  After I’d walked Sara to her car, had another round of tearful hugs, and waved good-bye, I broke the news to Lois and Yvonne.

  “You did what?” The unfazeable, nothing-shocks-me-anymore, jaded-to-the-core Lois stared at me with her mouth open.

  “Fired Sara.”

  Lois reached out with a bony index finger and poked me in the upper arm. “Still flesh and blood. No, wait. Let me see your teeth. Come on . . . Okay, good. You’re not a vampire. So the only possibility is that you’ve been possessed by . . . by the spirit of Auntie May.” She smiled and nodded, obviously happy with her conclusion. “Auntie May’s spirit can’t stand being restricted to the confines of Sunny Rest and has reached out for a malleable soul that she can use to do her evil bidding.”

  It sounded reasonable. Except for one thing. “Auntie May likes Sara. Almost as much as she likes Yvonne.”

  Lois and I looked at Yvonne. “She just likes the books I pick out,” she said. “That doesn’t mean she likes me.”

  Her horrified tone sounded quite real. Which I could understand. The thought of having Auntie May as a close friend and confidante was not a comfortable one. Not only that, but the knowledge lurking inside Auntie May’s head was generations deep and Rynwoodites of all ages hoped it would never be passed on.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Firing isn’t really the right term. It’s more like I encouraged her to quit for a while.”

  Lois put her hands on her hips. “Are you nuts? Sara’s the hardest worker we have. She’s willing to sort stickers and clean the bathroom, and she always wants to work during the big sales and on Saturdays and she’s young and pretty and energetic, and how on earth are we going to get along without her?”