“So, whose application are you filling out, if I may be bold enough to ask?” He tucked his chin to his chest in a gun-shy but teasing posture.
It’s for me,” Sarah answered softly, still afraid to admit it out loud.
“Beg pardon?”
“Me!” she insisted more boldly. “The application is for me.”
He stared at her with eyes the color of wet slate. The man was a ringer for that famous British soccer player who’d moved with his Spice Girl wife from London to Beverly Hills. Sarah’s seven-year-old could probably recite their names, but there was zero allowance for pop culture in a single mother’s life. Bearing the load alone was heavy, but not more than she could manage.
During the last moments of her husband’s battle with leukemia, she’d held Joe in her arms and encouraged him to let go of this life, promising him that their girls would be okay. And that was mostly true. Today Carrie, Meg and Hope had what they needed, they just didn’t have who they needed. And now Sarah was going to spend more hours away from them to finish the degree that had once meant so much to her. Some people would say her plan was selfish, but her employer had offered to pay the tuition—how could a widow turn that down?
“I’m going to complete my undergraduate.”
“That’s wonderful,” Cullen said encouragingly.
“Really? You don’t think I’m a bit...mature?”
He held his arms out in a “look at me” posture.
“Sarah, now that we’ve taken turns accusing each other of being over the hill, my guess is we’re probably about the same age. Ninety percent of the people on this campus expect that I’m a teacher because I’ve been studying here for so long. But trust me when I say I’m not the only individual over thirty—or even forty—who’s sitting on the observation side of the lectern. We actually have a sophomore in her seventies named Ruthie George. After Ruthie’s husband passed away, she decided to get her master’s.”
“Good for her,” Sarah said, voicing her approval over the older woman’s decision to keep moving forward with her life.
But Ruthie had probably shared many decades with her husband, while Sarah had been cheated of so many precious years. Life had short-changed her young family and her heart would forever bear a tender bruise from the loss.
Somehow life went on, the girls outgrew their shoes and Sarah outgrew her fears. She’d put one foot in front of the other and pressed ahead for the sake of her daughters. And if she wanted to advance any further with the law firm and get her paralegal licensing, she had to complete her education.
“I think I’d enjoy meeting Ruthie. She sounds like a role model I could use in my circle of friends right now.”
Sarah was grateful for her mother’s unfailing help with the girls, but Margaret Callaghan had never had professional ambitions, and she’d never worked outside their family home.
“Ruthie says that it’s her time to fly,” Cullen explained. “For fifty years she put her family before her education and now that she’s alone again, she’s going to do whatever it takes to fulfill the dream she put on hold the moment her first child was born.”
“Your friend and I have a lot in common, in spite of our thirty-year-age difference.”
“You’ve been a stay-at-home mom, too?”
“Only when the girls were little. As soon as my youngest was out of diapers I went to work with a law firm. But now, if I want to advance any further I have to get my paralegal certification. I can’t do that without an undergraduate degree, and since they’re willing to pay for it, here I am.”
There was a ruckus a few tables away as young people who were playing cards broke into laughter. Sarah supposed there had been a day when she’d been so carefree but it had been so long ago it was nothing more than a distant memory. Their smiling faces reminded her of her daughters and she glanced at the wall clock above the exit door.
“Let me get out of here so you can finish.” Cullen gathered up the bits of trash from their coffee and swept the table clean with a napkin. “I’m sorry I interrupted your efforts,” he apologized.
“I don’t mean to run you off, but I have to get this to your Miss Nancy before the office closes.”
“By next week she’ll be your Miss Nancy, too.”
“Oh, gosh, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“There are probably a lot of things you haven’t thought of yet. When you want a class recommendation or even a cup of coffee with your new friend, Cullen Temple, just give me a holler.”
“Do I holler at any particular corner of the campus?”
“I can generally be found in the history department, Heath-Harwick Hall. But if you don’t spot me over there just leave a message with Miss Nancy.”
“And she’ll see that you get it?”
“Probably not, but it’s worth a try.”
Cullen tilted his handsome head in a gesture of respect, took his coffee mug and made his way toward the exit, stopping every few tables to speak to someone he knew. Sarah wouldn’t be hanging out in the student center often enough to have acquaintances on campus like Cullen did. But she had made one new friend—though if she didn’t finish the enrollment form soon she wouldn’t even get another chance to speak to him.
“My new friend, Cullen Temple,” she said only loud enough so that she could hear the words. “I like the way that sounds.”
CULLEN FIGURED A week of preparation for his first class was enough.
He’d figured wrong.
Standing before the small group in Blair’s lecture hall on Monday afternoon, he felt like a poor substitute for the professor the students had expected to hear. After he began to rush through the talking points, only one person bothered to make eye contact, and having that person’s blue eyes fixed on Cullen’s every move only made things more nerve-racking.
Twenty minutes short of the ninety-minute class he closed Blair’s carefully prepared notes and dismissed the group. He turned about-face as they hurried toward the exit as if their stand-in instructor might call them back for another hour of boredom on European civilization.
“The sign on the lecture hall door claims you’re Dr. Cullen Temple but you didn’t sound anything like the smooth talker I had coffee with last week.”
Cullen looked around to find Sarah Eason standing in front of him. She’d tried to be helpful by signaling him a couple of times during his lecture to slow his delivery down, without success.
“Was that awful, or what?” he asked, already well aware of the answer.
“I wouldn’t say awful. Awful is a dried-up, day-old hot dog. That was more of a cold, greasy onion ring. If you just warm it up there may still be potential.”
“I’m sorry you witnessed that debacle.” He slumped against the white board on the wall behind him. “I shouldn’t have agreed to take over this class. It’s one thing to be a guest lecturer on a subject of my own choosing and quite another to pick up where a tenured professor has left off.”
“So Dr. Mastal really was supposed to be teaching this class, as it says on the syllabus? I thought maybe I’d wandered into the wrong lecture hall, but when I saw it was you I decided to hang around. I’m only auditing this semester so it’s not as if anybody was expecting me.”
“I hope my performance tonight doesn’t stop you from sitting in on the class again.