Free Your Father Sends His Love by Stuart Evers

her, in his face something she has not seen before.
    â€˜What’s that?’ Maria says as something is passed from Dre to Sandip.
    â€˜Nothing, Miss,’ Dre says.
    Maria strides down the aisle and plucks the note from under the boy’s hand.
    The note says I so wanna fuck Miss C so bad . It is Chas’s handwriting. Maria puts it in her pocket and returns to the whiteboard, runs through the equation and its solution, unsure whether the burn of her face or the burn from her wings is more intense. She looks at the note throughout the day to check it hasn’t changed. She has been teaching since she was twenty-two and she has never provoked such a reaction. There has always been another teacher to take the heat.
    The note is in her pocket as she drives to the child-minder. Maria waves at the woman and her youngest, Amy, bundles towards the car, all bag and coat, perfectly red-round blushes on her cheeks. Chloe, twelve and still insulted she has not been entrusted with her sibling’s safety, ambles behind. They get in the car and both, today, kiss her.
    â€˜Hello,’ Maria says. ‘You two had a good day?’
    â€˜Yes, Mum,’ they say not quite in turn, not quite in unison.
    â€˜Me too,’ she says.
    â€˜You look pretty today,’ Amy says as they drive away.
    â€˜You’re not getting a puppy,’ Maria says. ‘I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, you’re not getting a puppy.’
    Amy looks slightly perplexed. The note burns shamefully in Maria’s pocket.
    â€˜Actually, Mum, you do look good at the moment,’ says Chloe. ‘She’s right, for once.’
    â€˜That’s very sweet of you both,’ she says and checks her reflection in the rear-view mirror. She does not see any difference, her face still too wide and plump, haircut too severe, eyes thin and heavy. She imagines the wings throbbing, or perhaps they do. All the way home she can’t decide.
    Once the girls are in bed and Tom is reading Harry Potter to Amy, she lies on the sofa in front of two glasses of wine. There is a programme paused on the television and she is finishing off the last of her marking. In his exercise book, Chas’s algebraic a, b and cs remind her of the note. It has been on her mind anyway, working through the books, knowing his would be there in the stack. Gwen would have humiliated that boy. She would have made him an example, shown the girls in class that they did not need to accept this kind of behaviour. Her sister would have found it hilarious; would have asked her whether she was going to pursue it.
    â€˜Boys are at their sexual peak at that age,’ she’d have said. ‘You should make up for your prudish youth!’
    A prudish youth: yes. Even when she and Gwen lived together. Tom the first and last. Toilet-brush hair and stupid jokes and the look and sound of a posh boy. And even that first time, when it was over, he’d held her tight as swaddling. He held her all the night and into the morning. She never felt him letting go.
    Tom opens the lounge door, and with the exaggerated steps of Wile E. Coyote tiptoeing away from one of his own bombs, he joins her on the sofa. Tom has long spindly legs that add to the effect. She laughs even though she has seen it a thousand times.
    â€˜Levity? Laughter?’ he says. ‘On a Tuesday? With your reputation?’
    â€˜You bring it out in me,’ she says and picks up her wine glass.
    Something flashes, glints, and her hand freezes as she’s still holding the wine; a thought that needs to be spooled back.
    Tom smiles. He rubs her feet, left and right, and she relaxes again and puts down the wine. He presses play and the programme begins with the pursuit of a young girl, the scene shot with jagged, hand-held camera work. The opening credits roll. She looks at the wine glass on the coffee table and realizes she hasn’t thought of Gwen once today. Not once.