He decided to gloss over the beginning and concentrate on the present.
“The beginning started with a youthful marriage that didn’t—” Caleb made a gesture with his hand that conveyed a helpless sense of frustration “—work out.”
Julie searched his face, looking for signs of pain at the memory of his failed marriage. She couldn’t find any. Outwardly, at least, it appeared that he had recovered emotionally. But if that were true, then why was he finding it so hard to talk about it?
“I’m not doing this well,” Caleb muttered, caught between embarrassment at being forced to reveal what he preferred to keep hidden, and the knowledge that if he wanted to enlist Julie Raffet’s aid, he had to tell her enough to make her understand how desperate his need was.
“You’re divorced?” The question escaped Julie’s lips before she had a chance to consider the wisdom of asking. It wasn’t that she wanted to know personally, she assured herself. She was simply trying to help him get to the point.
“Yes.” The stark word sent through Julie a flood of contradictory emotions that she made no attempt to sort out.
“My ex-wife was an artist of considerable talent and, when she found out she was pregnant, she decided that marriage stifled her creativity. So she filed for divorce.”
Julie arched her pale brown eyebrows in disbelief. “She thought marriage was too stifling, but motherhood wouldn’t be?”
“Murna was into her Madonna phase at the time,” he muttered obscurely.
Wrong, Murna was into her lunacy phase, Julie thought acidly.
“And you let her have custody of the baby?” Some of the anger Julie felt at the emotional mess two supposed adults must have created for their poor, defenseless child sharpened her voice.
“Murna said that the baby wasn’t mine,” he said starkly.
“And you believed her?”
“I had good reason to believe her! But even knowing about her affairs, if I had just stopped and thought… If I had insisted on a DNA test…” His voice was harsh with pain, regret and self-condemnation.
“I see.” She felt an unexpected impulse to put her arms around him and comfort him. To try to ease the anguish darkening his eyes.
Don’t get emotionally involved, Julie reminded herself of one of the cardinal rules of good teaching. One she broke regularly.
“But all that’s history,” Caleb said. “What’s important is that yesterday morning without any warning my wife’s lawyer dropped Will off at my office along with a document from Murna transferring custody to me.”
Caleb’s voice was flat, revealing none of the tremendous upsurge of love he’d felt when he’d seen his son for the first time. He hadn’t needed the proof of paternity Murna’s lawyer had offered. His relationship to Will was written on the boy’s face for the whole world to see. No one who saw Will would ever mistake him for anything other than a Tarrington.
Caleb had wanted to throw his arms around his son and hug him. To try to explain why he hadn’t been a part of his life before. But Will’s rigid posture had discouraged any show of physical affection, and Caleb knew he couldn’t try to justify his absence from his son’s life by telling the child about his mother’s lies. A six-year-old couldn’t handle that kind of knowledge.
“To cut to the heart of the matter, Miss Raffet, the situation is this. I find I am suddenly responsible for a six-year-old son I know nothing about. Hell, I’ve never had more than a nodding acquaintance with any kid. Added to which, my housekeeper is an old maid who has never worked in a household with children.”
“Single,” Julie muttered. “We don’t say old maid anymore.”
Caleb didn’t even hear her correction. He was too intent on making her understand the gravity of his situation.
“But the coup de grâce came this morning when I asked Will what grade he was in so that I could enroll him in school for next fall. And do you know what he said?”
Too agitated to stand still, Caleb began to pace back and forth in front of the blackboard.
“Be careful not to get chalk dust on your dark suit,” Julie automatically warned.
“What?” Caleb glanced around as if surprised to find himself where he was. He gave her a rueful smile. “Then we’d be a matched set. Me in chalk dust and you in gold glitter.”
A set. The curiously seductive word lingered momentarily in Julie’s mind before she was able to banish it.
“My son said he didn’t know what grade he was in because he’d never been to school.”
“Kids say lots of things,” Julie warned him. “Especially at six. Their distinction between fact and fantasy is not very firm.”
“Well, he was dead-on with that particular fact! I called Murna to find out what was going on, and she said that she thought school stifled young minds. That she wanted Will to learn because he wanted to, not because he was forced to. So she simply registered him as a home-schooled student and left him to his own devices. She insisted that if I just leave him alone, eventually Will will learn everything he needs to know.”
“An…interesting theory.” Julie bit back her real opinion with an effort. Caleb Tarrington’s ex-wife sounded like the most selfish, egocentric woman she had ever run across. She must have been monstrously beautiful for Caleb to have missed what had to have been warning signs of her self-centered personality. The thought unexpectedly depressed her.
“Why now?” The question suddenly occurred to Julie.
“What?” Caleb looked puzzled.
“Why suddenly give you custody of your son after all this time?”
“Murna’s been commissioned to sculpt something or other in Venice, and she doesn’t think Will would like it there.”
Translated, it meant that dear Murna thought that a six-year-old would be too much trouble to drag around Europe, Julie thought angrily. So the woman off-loaded Will onto his father.
“Anyway,” Caleb continued, “when I realized that Will was going to have to go to school not knowing what all the other kids knew, I called John, the only educator I know, and asked him for advice.”
“And John suggested me?” Julie said slowly, beginning to understand.
“Yes, he said you were the best first-grade teacher he’s ever encountered.”
Julie tried not to be swayed by the compliment. But she was. John had never handed out praise with a liberal hand, and his comment was praise of the highest order.
“I want to hire you for the summer to teach Will what he needs to know so he can enter second grade next fall on a level with all the other kids his age,” Caleb said. “It’s going to be hard enough for him to adjust to living with a father he’s never met, in a town he’s never even heard of, without flunking the first grade through no fault of his own.”
“We don’t flunk kids these days.” Julie instinctively rejected the bleak picture he presented.
“So you plunk him down in the second grade where he can’t do the work and let him constantly fail?” Caleb demanded. “Is that supposed to be better?”
“No, of course not, and I sympathize with your problem, but I have plans for the summer.” Julie tried to sound firm. She did have plans, she assuaged her conscience. She was going to landscape her yard. And she was enrolled in two graduate classes at the university. And she had a stack of reading material six feet high to get through. Her entire summer was