Jenna thought it was odd that he didn’t make eye contact with her. They had always been good friends, and after Ally died, they had seemed to grow closer. Grant wasn’t the kind of guy to cry on a friend’s shoulder or reveal his deepest, darkest fears, but he knew he could depend on her.
Jenna glanced over her shoulder as she exited the main office into the hallway, and caught him watching her….
As Jenna walked out of the front office, it was all Grant could do to keep himself from lowering his head to his desk and pounding his forehead on it. He couldn’t believe he had tripped over that box in the copy room while gawking at Jenna. He couldn’t believe he’d let her startle him like that. He balled up the form he had been filling out, tossed it into the waste can beside his desk and grabbed another from a file in the drawer to his left.
Grant hadn’t slept well last night in the chair in the den. His entire night had been riddled by strange dreams—Ally and Jenna on the beach calling him. Ally sitting beside him in front of the bonfire he had built for them. An anniversary celebration. But, when he had turned to her to offer a glass of celebratory wine, it had been Jenna beside him. The dream had been so real that he could still feel her warmth at his side. He could still smell that slightly flowery-musky fragrance she wore that permeated everything around her, her car, her house and even her classroom.
The dream had made him feel badly. Not so much because Ally was gone, but because he was dreaming of another woman. Never in all of the years of marriage to Ally had he dreamed of being with another woman and it scared him. He and Jenna had done nothing in his dream, but there had been feelings between them. Desires.
His face growing warm, he jumped up from his desk. The late bell had just rung. It would be time to do the morning announcements in a minute, he thought, pushing aside thoughts of Jenna and the smell of her.
“The morning announcements,” Catherine, his secretary said, appearing at his side out of nowhere.
Grant glanced at Catherine with her tight chignon and wire-frame glasses. She was wearing a slim, dark skirt that fell well below her knees and a white blouse that tied in a big bow beneath her chin. It looked like something his grandmother wore. Though Catherine was the age he was, she always seemed much older to him. She would have fit perfectly with Grandma Cora’s generation, had it not been for her flirtatious manner.
“Thanks, Catherine. Have you got those attendance numbers I need?”
She batted her lashes. The gesture was so overt it was almost funny. Almost. “Putting them on your desk, Dr. Monroe.” She used the title, as if he were a world-famous heart surgeon who had gone to medical school for a zillion years rather than a guy who had gone to a local university at night to get his doctorate in education administration, while balancing a teaching job, a family and a new baby in the household.
Grant read the morning announcements over the intercom as he always did, ending with a quote from someone famous. Sometimes the quotes were serious, sometimes they were funny. Sometimes they applied directly to the pursuit of knowledge, and sometimes they applied to life in general, but everyone seemed to appreciate them.
The announcements over, Grant left the front office and Catherine’s adoring eyes to walk the halls as he did each morning. The remainder of the day was spent tending to his duties and thinking about what Ally had said about dating Jenna. Attending a parent-teacher conference and thinking about Jenna. Sitting at his desk pretending to be diligently at work, while thinking about Jenna.
It was three o’clock and the school day was almost over when he strode out of his office, having no real purpose whatsoever except to change the scenery. Maybe if he took a walk, he could get Jenna out of his mind. Get what Ally had said out of his head. All day he’d heard his dead wife’s voice in the back of his head like a never-ending audiotape.
Date Jenna. I think you’ll fall in love with her and marry her…fall in love and marry her.
The idea was utterly absurd, Grant knew that. The trouble was that at the end of the videotape, Ally had made him promise he would give it a try. She had asked him to promise her that he would at least try one date. When he’d heard Ally’s words, he had had no intentions of making any promises, verbally or otherwise. But the second time he watched the tape after the girls went to bed, the promise had just popped out of his mouth. Without thinking, he had said, “I promise.”
So, a promise was a promise. Obviously, that’s what the dreams were all about. That was why he couldn’t stop thinking about Jenna. Because he had promised his wife. The logical answer to the problem was to ask Jenna out, have a nice evening and then go back to his den and tell his dead wife face-to-face that there was nothing between him and Jenna but friendship. No spark. Ally understood “the spark.”
Grant found himself passing the nurse’s office, passing the library headed straight for the kindergarten and first-grade wing. Headed straight for Jenna’s classroom as if she were a magnet.
He rounded the corner, and nearly fell over Jenna, who was on her hands and knees on the floor of the hall, lining up wet paintings of what appeared to be apples…or maybe roundish fire engines.
Grant made a noise in his throat, caught off guard. He had almost stepped on her.
“Whoa,” she cried, glancing up, smiling. Jenna was always smiling.
“What are you doing?” He slipped his hands into his pants pockets, not because he wanted them there, but because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with them. Suddenly his arms were long, gangly appendages that seemed to serve no purpose but to make him look and feel awkward in Jenna’s presence.
She began to crawl along the floor, spreading out the paintings along the wall. “We were doing watercolor painting this afternoon. Nice huh?”
He glanced over her shoulder. “Nice.”
“Hey, I called about that software again, but I’m not getting anywhere. The guy said teachers can’t place the orders, only ‘the brass.”’ She glanced up at him. “Think you’re considered the brass?”
Today, she wore her golden-red hair in a ponytail the way his girls often did. It was the best hairdo he could manage when Ally had first gotten sick. He had branched out to pigtails, doggy ears and doorknobs, though ponytails were still his best ’do. But somehow the ponytail didn’t look the same way on Jenna as it did on his girls. On Jenna, it was almost sexy.
He stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Leave the number in my mailbox.”
“Great.” She scooted along the floor, sliding more paintings against the wall, her fingertips tinted with wet red paint.
Inside the classroom, Grant could hear the children lining up to be dismissed. He could hear Jenna’s assistant, Martha, giving last minute reminders. If Grant was going to get this over with, he was going to have to do it now. “Um…” he said.
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Amy has soccer tonight. We didn’t find those Cliffs Notes for Hannah, so if you want me to, I can track them down tonight. I have a few errands to run anyway.”
“Hannah should not be using Cliffs Notes. She needs to read The Crucible. I read The Crucible in high school; you read it,” he heard himself babble. He stopped short, and took a deep breath. “Jenna, you want to go out to dinner Friday night?”
She glanced up at him, a soggy red paper in her hand with a name that resembled Anthony scrawled across it. She didn’t hesitate. “Sure. That would be nice.”
Jenna smiled and Grant relaxed. Hadn’t been so bad after all.
“Great,” he said. “Meet me at seven at that little French place you like?” He didn’t have the nerve to pick her up. That would, after all, make it a real date, wouldn’t it? “You know…separate cars in case I have to run home,” he explained.
“Sure. Works