Free Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood

“nonpastoral” duties. They made it sound like a promotion, but even through the mail I sensed their averted eyes. The transfer had been cloaked in a telltale secrecy; it was not commonly known that Baltimore was his destination, nor even that he had died. It took months to pry the truth out of Celie, longer still to get Mrs. Blanchard to admit, yes, there were accusations; from Mrs. Hanson, yes; that’s why the Church took him away. Mrs. Blanchard persuaded me to stop writing letters. The more you say no, dear girl, the more they will think yes. This is how people are.
    Mariette was moving through the room now, wiping down her lab tables.
    “Mariette?”
    She looked up.
    “Did you ever—?”
    “Not for one second. I never believed it for one second.”
    After a moment, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if your father might come back?”
    She resumed wiping. “No.”
    I’d been wanting to tell her that since the accident her father, too, had been on my mind. “You don’t think he might be out there someplace?”
    “He hasn’t spoken to me from the dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “That’s not what I’m asking.”
    “Lizzy,” she said. “I’m tired of talking about fathers.”
    I lowered my eyes. “I know I’ve been kind of hard to be around.”
    She finished her chore, then picked up an armful of schedules. “Come on. Let me help you with these.”
    We walked to my office together, out of words, our tandem footfalls echoing in the empty hall.

    That afternoon, after the schoolwide in-service—a tedious primer on our new attendance policy—I found Jane on the phone and a lurid bouquet of roses on her desk. She banged down the receiver. “Jerk,” she muttered.
    “A parent?”
    “A bully who wants to talk to you this very instant and won’t leave his name.” Jane always got tense when school started, though her patience at other times flirted with legend. She had trouble with beginnings, is all. I had trouble with endings. “I told him we had a school year getting underway and he’d have to wait in line like everybody else.”
    I looked around at the empty office. “And yet I see no line, thanks to you and your accomplice.”
    She slid the roses toward me. “For you,” she said. They had fully opened, petals flung back wantonly.
    “Who brought them?” I asked.
    “The flower man. No card”
    I took the flowers into my office, where I found Andrea Harmon pinching my plants. “Hey, Mrs. Mitchell” she said, as if no time had passed since my accident. No time, no loss, no change.
    One thing I admire about teenagers is their ability to remake themselves over the course of a summer. Some of the transformation is beyond their control, a six-inch growth spurt or a mouth whose baby curves have flattened out. The rest they assiduously tend—a new vocabulary, a pair of boots that hitches their natural gait, a copy of On the Road poking artfully out of a torn-back pocket. I’m not that kid from last year , these props warn all who witness, Don’t even think I’m that kid from last year. Andrea, however, looked the same. Same clotted eyelashes, same masky makeup, same gossamer hair dyed the color of a cheap merlot.
    “You got a boyfriend?” she asked, eyeing the roses.
    “I’m married, Andrea.”
    “That doesn’t stop some people.”
    I set the roses on the sill. “How’d you get past Mrs. Rodgers?”
    Andrea gave me a methodical once-over, then dropped some plant parts into my wastebasket. “Mrs. Rodgers doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head,” she said.
    I had to laugh, for this was Jane Rodgers’s perennial claim, and the other ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the student body appeared to believe it. Even the biggest, most galootish boys cowered in the lobby waiting for Jane’s say-so before making a dash for my office.
    I closed the door, a metal rectangle with a peephole placed far above eye level. Despite the plants, the window, the plaid rug, the photo of