Free The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

help in the school but her mind doesn’t stay on the lesson, and before long she is talking about a ballroom glowing with hundreds of candles, the line of young men with their hands held out to her. The children don’t mind. They put down their pencils and listen, or pretend to listen, to stories they’ve heard time and again. The slyer ones knowing the questions to ask, how to take them all farther and farther away from the open arithmetic text. The children don’t mind, but Alice does; she’s become quite serious about the school. Even the first fumbling year she realized that it was something she liked, and more, something she was good at. Finding the key to each child, seeing their brows unfurrow. She thinks, although she hasn’t mentioned it yet, that she would like to go for her certificate if the money can be found. And then maybe teach in the new high school and who knows, maybe some of her pupils will go on to do great things. Maybe one of them will say, years later,
I owe it all to my teacher, my first real teacher
.
    •  •  •
    Upstairs, Alice sets down the tray and goes into her own room, takes one swig from the bottle before she carries on down the hall, opens her mother’s door. As she pulls at the heavy drapes she thinks that they really should be cleaned. The girl might doit, but she’d have to be paid extra and Sarah would have something to say about that.
    It’s a quarter past seven
, she says, and her mother groans and reaches to touch the silver framed photograph beside the bed. Alice’s father adored her mother; no one told her that, but it was something she always knew. Maybe the way he bent his head to hear her light voice, the way he loved to tease. Once her mother stood before him, in a shimmering new dress made up by Miss Bolt.
Oh, my dear
, he said, sternly.
That color …
Putting aside his newspaper, walking slowly around her, taking a bit of fabric between his fingers. Stroking his chin.
It’s really too … too perfect
, he said, and Sarah and Alice laughed and laughed at the look on their mother’s face; she swatted at him and said,
Oh, Andrew
, and he laughed too, all of them laughing together. And Alice was struck by something that she’d never thought of before, by the fact that her parents were
people
, that they had lives before her, and without her. She was so taken with this thought that she whispered it to Sarah, who squinted her eyes behind her new spectacles and said,
What are you talking about? How silly you are; of course they’re people. What else did you think they were?
Later, in her room, Alice took a piece of paper and wrote her thought down. She’s certain she slipped it between the pages of a book, but she no longer remembers what book it was. Wonders if she will come across it years from now, and what it will be like, to see her childish hand again. Wonders if there will be anyone she can show it to. Once she had known, just known, that she would marry a handsome, brooding man who would somehow cross her path. Nothing like Sarah’s Gordon, with his heavy eyebrows, his awkward hands. Nothing like the boyish boys her friends whispered about. Not long before that terrible Christmas her family sat for the photographer, and with his wild hair, hisslender, stained fingers, with the way his words spun and flowed, Alice could hardly breathe when he touched her cheek, when he moved her head, just a little.
    She met him again by chance, the first time by chance, walking by the river with a small book in her hand. He was setting up his camera on its heavy tripod and he asked if she would read to him while he worked; her voice sounded thin and a little silly at first, but soon she was lost in the words. He told her that an idea had just come to him, that he would photograph the same view every few days, the river, seen through one curving branch, that he would do it until the branch was completely bare. That first day the afternoon sun was still warm, the leaves