Page 1 of Delay of Game
ONE
GRACIE
The mile-long dirtdriveway gave me plenty of time to stop crying. When I pulled up to the simple two-story farmhouse, I parked on the far side of the horseshoe driveway and checked the mirror.
Thank god I hadn’t bothered to put on mascara that morning.
The only thing more frightening to a six-year-old on the precipice of kindergarten was their teacher showing up two weeks before school starts with black mascara dripping down her face and a red nose.
Thankfully, the utter mess in the mirror cleared my tears. How long was too long to grieve someone who wasn’t dead? At three weeks, at least I didn’t burst into tears anymore. No, I’d suppressed my tears, only letting them out in the shower and in the car. Contained places. Places where I could sob without raised eyebrows and worried looks. Certainly not in the presence of my newest students.
I wiped my tears, patted my cheeks, and applied a light dusting of peach powder to blot out the redness on my face. Then I grabbed the folder in the seat next to me.
Mila Grant: six, lives with her father, Robert, only child.
Two years out of college and I prided myself on calm, collected classrooms. Well, not completely calm and collected, but for five- and six-year-olds? Fairly calm. And I credited my summer “meet the teacher” meetings as one way I prepared my students to enter elementary school.
Of course, with twenty kids in my class, I couldn’t visit everybody. Thankfully, my co-teacher, Lily, shared the responsibility with me. We’d split the pile of student names up by address, her taking the students closer to downtown while I took the more rural addresses. We’d visit the students once in their homes and then again at the school before classes started. Mila was the last student from those first round of meetings.
I shut the folder and picked up the bag on the passenger side floor. Inside were books and coloring supplies and a personalized “Welcome to Kindergarten” letter.
I walked up the driveway, surprised by the ample acreage. None of the fields looked like they were plowed, and other than a giant barn that looked more suited to fancy “country style” weddings, nothing showed that the land was used for anything besides space. A novelty in this suburb of Norwalk, where uncultivated land was gobbled up by developers who planted gated communities with row after row of identical two-story houses, affordable only by the elderly and the rich.
Either Mila Grant’s family had been living in Norwalk for generations or her father made more money than Croesus.
I knocked on the front door, straightening my back and putting on my biggest smile. An older woman opened the door, her face lighting up in recognition.
“Gloria?” I asked, surprised.
“Gracie!?” She beamed at me as she threw open the door and pulled me into a hug that smelled like chamomile and lemon and felt so comforting that I nearly started crying again. “Rob justsaid Mila’s teacher’s name was Mrs. Evans. I didn’t think for a minute you’d show up!”
She pulled away. “Tell me, how’s Mercy? We missed her at last month’s get together.”
The monthly women’s Bunco club had been meeting for decades, long before I moved to Virginia. I’d attended only a few times, when Aunt Mercy was sick or they needed another player.
Tears sprung to the corner of my eyes, and I cleared my throat. “Good. She’s settling in.”
Gloria’s lips turned down into a frown, her brow furrowing. “We talked about stopping by for a visit, but we didn’t want to overwhelm her. She doesn’t think we’ve forgotten her?”
I bit back a reflexive laugh. Aunt Mercy’s steady mental decline wasn’t funny. The diagnosis wasn’t funny. But unexpectedly running into Gloria short circuited the careful walls I’d built to keep school and home separate.
“Oh, I phrased that poorly.” Gloria pressed a finger to her mouth, face collapsing into a frown. “That’s not why you’re here. You’re here to meet Mila, aren’t you?”
A pair of pigtails appeared and disappeared behind Gloria’s arm. “Is that my teacher?”
Gloria stepped aside, and Mila wasted no time slipping under her grandmother’s arm. A little girl, clad in a voluminous pink princess costume complete with crown, stared up at me with big brown eyes.
“You must be my newest student,” I said, sinking down to her level. “I’m Ms. Evans.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, sinking into a low curtsey. “But I’m not sure I want to go to kindergarten.”
“Really? I thought it might be fun.”
She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” I said, shaking off any residual sadness that crept through. “Well, I brought some things to play with. Would it be okay if we just played together for a bit?”
Mila reluctantly nodded her head. We played two games of memory and a counting game before we turned to the stack of books tucked into my bag. We sat on her living room couch, Mila pressed to my side as I read through “The Pigeon Has to Go to School.” She sat through the entire story, eyes following the words as I pointed them out, only speaking when I asked a question. A remarkable feat, considering her newest classmate, a five-year-old boy named Harvey, couldn’t get through the title without interruption.
