9
“Cora seems to enjoy leaving you swinging around me,” he says, grinning.
I sigh, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, she does.”
“Another girls’ night out?”
I shrug. “Just Cora and me having some downtime.”
He nods. “You and Cora are pretty close, then?”
“You could say that. We were in preschool together and have spent just about every single intervening day together since.” I laugh. “Actually, it goes back further than that. We were born the same day, in rooms next door to each other at the hospital. My mom says we were in bassinets in the maternity ward next to each other, and that we were just fated to be best friends for life.”
“That’s really awesome. I’m kind of jealous of that.”
“You don’t have any friends like that?”
He shakes his head. “Not really. I mean, there are a couple childhood friends I’m still in contact with, but they’re all back in Nashua and I’m here.”
“This is kind of an odd place to end up,” I say.
He shrugs. “I…I needed a drastic change.”
“Well, moving from the capital of New Hampshire to our quaint little Pennsylvania village is as drastic a change as you can get short of leaving the country.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Mind if I ask why you moved?” I shouldn’t ask that. Asking him personal questions will lead to him asking me personal questions…and that’s us getting to know each other, and that’s entering dangerous territory.
Yet, I just can’t seem to stop myself.
He lifts a shoulder. “The divorce.” He tilts his head to one side. “Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s more complicated than that, actually. I was sort of stuck at the school I was teaching at in New Hampshire. They’d just hired a new assistant principal, and the principal was relatively young, like forty-five or so, and was clearly going to be a lifer. I wanted to be in administration. I loved teaching, but I wanted to be a principal—that was my goal from day one. I sent resumés to school districts across the country—I didn’t reallywantto move, but I was willing to. And I guess I…well, I sort of overlooked how resolute my wife—myex-wife was about not moving. We were having issues anyway, and I guess I justified it by thinking that a change of scenery might help our marriage, you know? Like, we’d both been born and raised in the Nashua area, and we knew everyone and everyone knew us. And I thought, if it was just us in a new place, and we had to rely on each other, maybe that would fix things.”
I wince. “Not so much?”
“No. Like I said, we’d been struggling with…well, issues, I guess, and we’ll leave it at that for now. I didn’t think it was over, and neither of us had said the D word at any point. I was sending my resumé out all over the place, taking interviews at schools everywhere from Oregon to Texas to Florida, hoping for a principal job, and nothing was opening up. It was just a constant flood of ‘not the right fit’ or ‘not quite what we’re looking for.’ Meaning, nobody wanted to hire a thirty-something teacher with zero administrative experience as a head principal.”
“I mean, don’t you usually start as an assistant principal somewhere?”
He laughs. “Well yeah, usually, and I was applying for anything that had the word ‘principal’ attached to it. Time was slipping away, you know? I’d been teaching for ten years at that point already, and I was eager to start the next phase of my career as an educator.” He waves a hand. “And then one day I got a call back from this elementary school in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. Their principal was retiring and they were thinking about hiring someone young and fresh to take over and shake things up.”
“And here you are?”
“Eh, not quite.” He stares beyond me, seeing the past, I think. “I did the interview, felt confident about it…but also felt a good bit of apprehension about such a drastic move. And the issues Iris and I were having…weren’t getting better. They were getting worse, if anything. And when I told her I wanted to take this job, she…well, she didn’t respond well. And that’s when the D word got dropped—by her, first—not that it matters in the end. She told me she wasn’t going to move, and if I wanted to take this job, go ahead, but she’d be serving me divorce papers if I did.”
“Ouch.”
He nods. “Yeah. And I think once that idea gets floated, you can’t take it back.”
“No, you can’t,” I agree, thinking of Daniel.
“So, I told them I needed time to think, and they gave me two weeks to tell them yes or no, but that if I said yes, I’d have as much time as I needed within reason to make the transition happen.” He sighs. “But really, I knew I was going to say yes. I just wanted time to see if I could salvage things with Iris.”
“Which clearly didn’t work.”
“No, clearly not.” He takes a sip of his wine. “So, by the way, all this was taking place more than two years ago. The school here wanted to have someone lined up and ready to go, wanted to give Mr. Mackey plenty of time to tie up loose ends, you know? He’d told them he was ready to start the process, and so they started looking for a replacement, and it took them a while to find me, and then even after I’d told them yes, Mr. Mackey wanted to finish that year, and then my divorce was taking a long time to settle…”
“Not amicable, then?”
