Page 9 of Welcome to Forever
“I’m trying, but look at today. It was the first day of school and already there was vandalism and a student popped the tire of another child’s wheelchair.”
“Two incidents. No big deal. You were perfect.”
“Huge deal.” Kat set down her spoon, no longer hungry. “Don’t you remember how the last school year ended? Seaside Elementary was becoming known for its incidents rather than the fact that we have top-notch teachers and some of the highest academic scores in the state.”
Val nodded. “We’re a military town. It’s kind of natural for the kids to duke it out. Like dogs marking their territory.”
This roused a smile from her—one of the reasons she loved Val. “You’re comparing my students to dogs?”
“Or wolves. It’s the hierarchy of nature, or some shit like that.”
Kat collected her bowl and headed to the sink. “That’s it. You’re cut off from the Discovery Channel.”
“So, what are you going to do?” Val asked, following behind her.
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to do something, in John’s honor. I’m going to turn Seaside Elementary into a place where students accept each other, care about each other—”
“And you’re cut off from the Hallmark Channel.” Val gave Kat’s shoulder a playful shove, then jumped as the phone rang in her pocket. “It’s Doug,” she said, reading her caller ID. “I’ll take it outside.”
Kat watched her friend disappear out the front door. Glancing down at her engagement ring, she thought about Julie’s announcement that she was coming home for a visit. Julie was a lot of things, but Val was wrong about her. Her sister wasn’t a soul sucker. She just had a different way of doing things. And if Julie had it her way, by the end of next week, she’d have John’s stuff boxed up, the engagement ring on its way to a pawnshop, and a new man in Kat’s life, possibly in her bed.
Well, that last part might be nice. She’d just have one ground rule—no Marines.
—
Micah glanced at Ben in the rearview mirror. He wasn’t smiling. It had been a rough first week—not horrible, but it hadn’t lived up to Ben’s hopes—and now Micah had to stop procrastinating and finally tell him that his mother was deploying again.
“Pizza?” he asked, meeting Ben’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
“On a school night?”
“Yeah, why not?” He tried to act like it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Those rarely happened in the Peterson household, though. His workload and Ben’s disability necessitated a schedule, which he did his best to maintain.
Ben scrunched his face.
“All right. Fine. If you don’t want pizza—”
“I do,” his son protested, slurring his words the way he did when his muscles were tired. And there was that lopsided smile.
Micah turned the Jeep Cherokee into the parking lot for Kirk’s Pizza House. It was the only pizza joint in Seaside, and the place was packed. A hostess showed them to the last table in the back and Micah followed, as Ben carefully maneuvered his chair down the narrow aisles.
When they were seated, Ben seemed to shrink in his chair. “You have something to tell me.” It wasn’t a question. “Otherwise, we’d be having boring chicken and green beans. That’s what you laid out this morning,” he said.
Damn, my kid is smart.
Micah licked his lips, stalling like the old Mustang he’d had when he was sixteen. “Maybe I didn’t want boring chicken and beans tonight,” he said, silently thanking God when the waitress interrupted, bringing them glasses of water and breadsticks. He wasn’t ready to talk about Jessica yet. Couldn’t they just enjoy their night for a while before his ex squashed it with her proverbial combat boots? “So, tell me about your day.”
Ben blew a breath toward a lock of dark hair falling in his honey-colored eyes. He’d inherited those from his mother. His left arm was too stiff to swipe the hair away, and his right arm—the strong one—was locked on a breadstick, slowly submerging it in pizza sauce. “We had a rally.”
Micah grabbed his own breadstick. “A pep rally?”
“Yeah.” Talking while he chewed, his son’s muddled words were even harder to understand. “Principal Chandler added a new subject to our curriculum. It’s called Good Deeds. We’ll be emailing the wounded soldiers at Camp Leon and writing letters to people in nursing homes. She’s also changing after-school detention to something called the Friendship Club. If you get in trouble, you have to stay after school and work on the campus doing recycling and making new friends.”
Micah didn’t know what kind of friends were to be made in detention, but before he could think too much on it, the waitress was back to take their orders. He ordered a large pizza, half with just spinach for him and half with ham and sausage for Ben. His little man was a meat lover, and tonight he deserved whatever he wanted. “A club for misbehaving kids, huh?” he asked, recapping the conversation. Breaking his own rule, he reached for a second breadstick, promising himself that he’d run an extra mile in PT tomorrow. “That would’ve been nice last year, huh? A mean kid club.”
Ben stopped dipping his bread for a second, and Micah immediately regretted bringing up the bullies.
“Friendship Club,” Ben corrected quietly, his voice so low that Micah had to guess at what he’d actually said. “And the kids in the club have to do nice things for everyone.”
