Luke hesitated a small but noticeable fraction of a moment. “Students are counting on it,” he said. “Some of these kids live miles away, with parents who, for whatever reason, can’t drive them to school. If we lose transportation, we lose students, and that means we lose revenue.”
“Tell me something, Luke. How many buses do we have here?”
“Two.”
“For how many students?”
Luke thought for a moment. “About twenty-five.”
Fred grimaced and swabbed his forehead again. “That’s only about ten percent of the student body. Last time I looked, we weren’t making much profit on transportation fees. With the cost of oil going up, we might even be working at a loss.”
“No way.” Luke shook his head. “We’re making several hundred dollars’ profit with each transportation contract we have.”
Fred gave a shrug that said he wasn’t quite buying it. “We’ll talk about it another time,” he said dismissively. “We’re not making any changes immediately.”
Luke expelled a tense breath and stood very rigid beside Grace. “I hope a few alternative plans were introduced.”
“Of course, of course,” Fred said. Grace got the impression that he’d already made up his mind about it. “Now there’s just one more thing.”
Grace could almost feel Luke’s agitation growing.
“What’s that?” he asked, clipped.
“As you may recall, the board wants the staff to be certified in CPR.”
“That’s right.” Luke looked at Grace. “Did you say you were certified?”
“Well, I took a class at the Red Cross, but I don’t have the actual certification.” She was about to add that she’d signed up for a refresher class at the firehouse already, but Luke interrupted her.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You can just take the course here. I should have mentioned it before. It’s a new policy, and I wasn’t thinking about it when I hired you.”
“She’s not the only one who needs the certification,” Fred said, raising an eyebrow at Luke.
“I know, Libby Doyle in the math department is already scheduled for a class in Dover this summer when she goes to visit her family.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
For a second, Grace felt sorry for him. She’d been to his office; she knew he had a lot piled on his desk already. Although she questioned whether they needed to work on the bus so early in the morning, she did believe that it had taken some effort on his part to carve out that hour or so he had to do it.
“The entire staff needs to be certified,” Fred was saying. “My secretary already looked into it and discovered that the Red Cross is sponsoring an all-day course at the firehouse next month.”
“What’s the date?”
“Saturday the 20th,” Grace answered. “I saw the sign at the pharmacy and thought at the time it would be a good idea to refresh my memory, so I signed up.”
“Wonderful!” Fred was clearly delighted. “Such a clever girl. You are your mother’s daughter.” He turned back to Luke.
“So all we need to do is sign you up.”
“I’ll be there,” Luke said, sounding as if it were the last thing on earth he wanted to do.
“Excellent,” Fred said, patting his handkerchief along the back of his neck. “Glad you’re both willing to pitch in this way.”
Luke nodded, as if he’d had a choice, which everyone knew he hadn’t. Then he looked at his watch. “I’m sorry,” he said to Grace, “but I have to get inside for a conference call in fifteen minutes, and I’m not going to be around in the morning. How about if we finish this tomorrow evening? Say, around seven?”
“It’s a date,” she said, automatically.
He didn’t correct her, but he might as well have for the dark look he gave her. “Seven,” he repeated. “We’ll do one last drill. After that, you’re on your own.”
* * *
“When are we going home?”
“We are home,” Grace said to Jimmy for what seemed like the tenth time the next day. “For now.” She stabbed the ground with a trowel, thinking of Michael, and tossed the dirt aside. It was late to be planting tomatoes and basil, but she’d bought mature plants, and with a little luck she’d have a midsummer harvest. “You’re going to have to think of it that way.”
Jimmy rubbed his eyes with dirty hands, streaking mud across his lightly freckled face. His blond hair was sprinkled with dirt, like powdered sugar on toast. “But it’s not like home.”
“No.” Grace tried to temper her frustration at having to make him feel better about the move when she was having so much trouble feeling good about it herself. “For one thing, you’ve got this nice big yard to play in.”
“Yeah, and no one to play with.” She didn’t like the sulky edge to his voice. It sounded too familiar. She herself had said almost the same thing to her mother last night when they were talking about the unlikely possibility of Grace ever having a date again.
It’s not like there’s anyone to go out with in this town even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
“So you’ll have to get out and meet new people,” Grace said, like a tape recording of her mother.
“There are no new people here.”
She turned to him, startled. It was exactly what she’d said, but she had reason to say it. Blue Moon Bay held on to its inhabitants the way a spiderweb held flies…once you were trapped here it was difficult to leave. It was hard to say whether that was because people loved it so much or whether it was just too much trouble to move away. Unless, of course, one was an attractive eligible male.
But whatever problems Grace had with moving back, it should have been a dream town for a kid, with the ocean and the bay and the freedom and safety of living in a town where everyone looked out for everyone else.
“Everyone here is new to you,” Grace said.
“Everyone here is old!”
Grace laughed. “Come on, you’ve met Jenna’s kids.”
“They’re babies. They’re only, like, eight.”
“Well, don’t worry about it, because when you start summer school you’ll meet a bunch of new kids.”
“That’s another thing,” Jimmy said, like a little lawyer with his Evidence Against Blue Moon Bay all lined up. “Why do I have to go to summer school? If we were back home, with Dad, I’d get the summer off like normal kids. Like my friends.”
Grace winced inwardly. He was absolutely 100 percent right. But if he were back home, he’d be going to a school that was less academically challenging than Connor. “Well, in this case it’s a good thing you have summer school, because you will meet kids your age there. See? So it’s all working out perfectly.”
“Dad’s not here,” Jimmy muttered, kicking a bag of topsoil.
She was tempted to point out that Dad had seldom been around in New Jersey either, that whole days had passed when he got home after Jimmy had gone to bed and was asleep in the morning when Jimmy got up for school…but pointing out Michael’s parental inadequacies wouldn’t really make her feel better, and it for sure wouldn’t make Jimmy feel better.
Grace