At the front door she set down the box to find and insert her master key in the lock, but their youngest custodian, Tony, who was doing a dance step down the hallway, saw her through the window and came to help. He was wraith-thin, with blond dreadlocks and a red soul patch that looked like a strawberry sprouting from his chin.
Once she was inside, Tony lifted the box out of her arms and followed her as she headed halfway down the corridor to her office. “You’re here early, Mrs. F.”
“So are you.” That was the real surprise. Tony was rarely where Georgia thought he ought to be. Tony had framed their first months together as a test of her leadership abilities. The next phase had been an attempt to “educate” her about the real meaning of his job description. Most recently he seemed bent on ingratiating himself.
Tony had finally realized that not only was his new boss not a pushover, she was also perfectly capable of having him fired if necessary.
“I unlocked it already.” Tony stopped outside the school office, and Georgia pushed open the door.
The first thing that greeted visitors was a banner strung over the reception counter printed with the school’s motto. Because You Can. Because You Will. The second greeting was the smell—part mildew, part decay. The offices weren’t yet ready to give up old habits.
She preceded Tony and wound her way behind the counter toward the far wall.
“I wanted to get the kitchen floor mopped before the lunch ladies get here and mess it all up again,” he said, glancing at her to calculate her reaction.
Tony sucking up was an improvement over earlier behavior, but at least partly dishonest. The cafeteria staff were as tidy as surgical nurses, and Georgia suspected that sometime in the past twenty-four hours they had cornered the young man and insisted he do a thorough mopping or his head would roll. They were the only staff members in the school that Georgia was afraid of, too.
“You’re in charge of cleaning my office, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I’m the lucky guy.”
Of the four full-time custodians, she’d picked the winner. “A good vacuuming after school this afternoon, please. And I don’t think my trash has been emptied this week.”
“I been meaning to get to that.” He shook his head and blond dreadlocks flopped in emphasis. “It’s on my list.”
“High on your list, because it’s going to happen today, while I’m at the faculty meeting.”
“It sure is.”
Georgia unlocked her office door, gesturing for him to go first.
“Where’d you want me to put this?”
Because it had been one of those weeks, Georgia’s desk was piled high. She yearned to have an hour without anything more pressing, so she could file and toss papers. With luck she would have an hour like that sometime in the late twenty-first century.
Georgia pointed to an empty space, one of the few. “Stick it on the bookshelf over there, thanks.”
He obliged her. “Unless you need something else, I’d better go finish the floor.”
“You’d better,” she agreed. “The lunch ladies get here early.”
He boogied out the doorway, and the sound of his whistling grew fainter until eventually she couldn’t hear it at all.
Georgia unsealed the cardboard flaps and began to remove files. She liked the silence of an empty school building. Sometimes she even thought she heard laughter from former students echoing through the hallways.
And sometimes...
She stopped and listened. Something besides laughter seemed to be rattling along this particular hallway. She wondered if Tony was dragging the wheeled mop bucket from the storage room to the lunchroom. But the sound was louder, and seemed to pass quickly, growing quieter, then louder again a few moments later.
She tried to remember whether Tony had locked the front door behind them and couldn’t.
Her cell phone rang, and once she’d rummaged through her purse a glance told her the call was from her daughter.
She put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Sam.”
“Mom, just checking to make sure we’re still on the same page today?”
The rattling in the corridor began again. She forced herself to concentrate.
“Taylor’s going to drop off Edna this afternoon, and hopefully my faculty meeting will be over when she gets here. If not, Marianne will let her wait in my office, and she can do her homework.” Marianne was the office manager, who always stayed late. Edna was Georgia’s twelve-year-old granddaughter.
“Great, we’re all set then.”
“Are you already on your way to Raleigh?”
“About an hour out of Asheville. The roads are clear.”
Georgia knew it was too late to change her daughter’s plans, but she had to ask. “I know we’ve all been over this together, but you still feel settling this young woman at the Goddess House is the best idea?”
“We don’t have any guarantees, but I think it’s the right thing to do. She doesn’t have anyone, Mom. And she needs to be near Michael.”
“Michael?”
“That’s what she named the baby.”
“She’s still not planning to bring him with her, then?”
“For now he’s settled with her cousin in Mars Hill, but she’ll be close enough to visit. She has a car. It’s already parked at the Goddess House. Taylor and I drove to Yancey County and got it, along with her clothes and everything else that had been stored for her. There wasn’t a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anybody who has so little to show for her life. She’s so alone.”
Georgia knew exactly how that felt, although for three decades now, she hadn’t been alone herself. She had Samantha and Edna, and in the past year, she had developed strong friendships with a small group of women who had banded together to see what kind of difference they could make in the world. The difference was extraordinary, but nobody who had faced the world without support ever forgot how frightening a place it could be.
She was nodding, which she realized didn’t help. “Then get her settled, and Edna and I will drive up after school. We’ll bring groceries.”
“I like her,” Samantha said, just before she hung up. “Cristy’s hard to get to know, and she shares as little as she can get away with. But there’s something about her.”
Georgia dropped her cell phone back in her purse just as the noise in the hallway began again. Shaking her head she made her way through the tidy outer office, lifted the pass-through at the end of the counter and headed out the door, just in time to see Dawson Nedley skateboarding toward the front entrance.
She stood in the middle of the hallway, arms folded, and when he turned and started back, he saw her.
For a moment it looked as if Dawson planned to simply scoot to one side and continue to the other end without so much as a hello, but at the last moment he jumped off the board and grabbed it before it could continue the trip without him. He jammed it, wheels still spinning, under an arm and cocked his head, as if to ask, Is there a problem?
“There are so many things wrong here,” she said.
He shrugged. Dawson, a junior, was dark-haired, dark-eyed and tan from hours working on his family’s farm. On the rare occasions when he smiled, he was a pleasure to look at, lean and strong and growing taller every day. She imagined he would easily top six