Romancing The Teacher. Marie Ferrarella

he’s in bed all right.” Susan passed the strap over her head and onto the opposite shoulder, messenger fashion. “Sleeping is another matter. He’s his mother’s son,” Susan told her daughter pointedly. “As I recall, I could never make you do anything you didn’t want to do even at that young, tender age, either.”

      Lisa didn’t bother wasting any more time discussing who was the adult here. Besides, her mother had to leave for work. And she had one young man to put in his place. Taking the stairs two at a time, she raced up to the small bedroom that was opposite hers.

      The door to her son’s room was ajar and she looked in. Casey was sitting in bed, propped up by the three extra pillows that were up against his headboard. His eyelids were drooping but they flew open immediately as the door opened.

      When he saw his mother, a smile flashed across his lips, gone the next moment as he struggled to be a miniature adult instead of a five-year-old.

      “You’re late,” he told her in a voice that sounded way too old to please her.

      “Yes, I know, and I’m sorry.” Crossing to his bed, she turned the lights down a notch, bringing shadows out from the backyard and casting them onto the ceiling. “Couldn’t be helped.”

      “How come you always help all those kids but you forget about me?”

      Sitting down on the bed beside her son, Lisa slipped her arm around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. Casey’s hair was straight and the color of newly minted gold. Like his father’s had been, she recalled. But Casey’s smile, his eyes, his manner, they all belonged to her side of the family. To her.

      “I don’t forget about you,” she insisted in a voice filled with love and patience. “It’s just that those kids have nobody and you have me, you have G-Mama, you have Uncle Frank. You have lots of people who love you very much,” she emphasized. “The kids I see have next to nothing and no one.” She went on stroking Casey’s hair. The soft, silky feel was soothing. “I met a little girl today. She’s around your age. And she can’t read.”

      “Can’t read?” her son echoed, his eyes widening. “What’s wrong with her?”

      “Nothing’s wrong with her,” Lisa replied. In the distance, she heard the front door close. Her mother had left for the night. Now it was just Casey and her. “Nobody ever took the time to teach her.”

      Casey screwed up his face, trying hard to understand. “Doesn’t she go to school?”

      Everything was so simple at Casey’s age. She wished she could keep him this way forever, protect him from a world where disappointments outnumbered triumphs, at times by frightening numbers. But in the long run, she knew it would be doing him a disservice.

      So instead, she tightened her arm around him just for a second, loving him as much as she could. “She’s homeless, honey. Homeless kids don’t always get to go to school like you do.”

      He nodded, accepting his mother’s word. “Are you going to teach her to read, Mommy?”

      “Maybe.” If Monica wasn’t gone by the next time she stopped by the shelter, she added silently.

      Before she could say anything else, Casey scrambled out of bed. “Hey, where are you going, cowboy?”

      Instead of answering, Casey dropped to his knees in front of the long, double-tiered bookcase that ran along the opposite wall. After finding the book he was looking for, he pulled it free of the others and brought it back to her.

      Casey was beaming when he handed the book to her.

      Lisa read the title. “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now?” Surprised, she looked down at her son. Casey was wiggling back into bed, pulling the covers up over himself. “This is the first book you ever read by yourself.”

      She remembered how he kept asking her to read the popular Dr. Seuss story to him over and over again and how, the first time he read it out loud to her, she was certain he had just memorized the words. He was, after all, barely four. She’d been both surprised and pleased beyond words when he picked words out of context to prove to her that he actually could read the book.

      Casey nodded. “It’s easy,” he told her matter-offactly. “Maybe you can teach her with this.”

      Overwhelmed, Lisa blinked back tears as she hugged the little boy to her. “You really are a special, special boy, Casey.”

      Casey tried to wiggle out of her grasp. “Mommy, you’re squishing me,” he protested, his voice muffled against her side.

      “Sorry,” she laughed, releasing him. Setting the Dr. Seuss book aside for the moment, she looked at him. “Ready to find out what happened to our friend the indian?” Silken hair bobbed up and down as Casey nodded vigorously. “Okay then, let’s get to it.” She reached for the book that Casey kept on the nightstand, the official resting place for each storybook she read to him. “When we left off…” she began.

      

      “So, how was it?” Marcus finally asked as he brought the sports car he’d bought for himself against Marjorie’s objections. At his age and success level, he felt he deserved at least one toy.

      He’d picked Ian up at the shelter at the appointed time. His friend had gotten in without saying anything. Now several blocks had gone by and still nothing. Marcus didn’t know if Ian was lost in the revelry of creation, or in the depths of the black depression that on occasion overwhelmed him.

      Because he cared about Ian, Marcus pushed rather than retreated, even though the latter would have been his natural inclination.

      After a beat, Ian looked at him. The shrug was casual. “All right, I guess. Hell of a wake-up call, being among the have-nots again.” Ian laughed softly to himself. Even the words sounded as if they were meant for him alone and not the man beside him. “Wasn’t all that long ago I was there.”

      “You worked your tail off not to be stuck at that level,” Marcus reminded him, thinking back to the lean and hungry days his friend had endured. Unlike him, Ian had not been born to money. “You pulled yourself up by sheer grit alone.”