Free Late Last Night (River Bend) by Lilian Darcy

which she taught on auto-pilot to freshmen and sophomore students who, even though they weren’t going to prom, were still infected by the atmosphere and couldn’t focus. School would be out in another week or two. They didn’t want to be here.
    Neither did she.
    At four she raced home to shower and change, and when she put on the little black cocktail dress that seemed appropriate for a prom chaperone, she wondered if she would even see Harrison tonight. He’d said he was playing chauffeur for his nephew Andy, but maybe he wouldn’t show. If he and his ex were getting back together…
    Kate had been thinking about it all afternoon, the whole subject had been churning around and around in her head, and she still couldn’t come up with another reason why Harrison would have taken the property off the market so suddenly, when he’d seemed so certain about selling it just a month ago and when he’d done everything, but said nothing on Wednesday night.
    She arrived back at school at just before six, to find a bevy of student prom organizers, full of stage fright about the prospect of the long-planned evening failing to achieve the desired success.
    “I know for a fact that Neve and her crew are planning to get here late,” she heard one girl say. “What if everyone does that, and we have a half-empty gym for the first two hours? What if no one comes for the buffet, and just shows for the dancing?”
    “Miz MacCreadie, have you ever been at a prom here that’s completely bombed?” somebody asked her, and she tried to give an encouraging and upbeat reply, even though her mind and her heart were a thousand miles away.
    “We need a greeter,” Principal Earnshaw told her, arriving abruptly at her side and looking both harried and bored, as if he’d been to thirty stressful, unpleasant proms and might fall asleep in the fruit punch if he had to stay long at this one.
    Well, he probably had been to thirty proms.
    “A greeter. You mean out front?” Kate said.
    “Yes, the parents like it. Proof that we’re paying the right attention.”
    “You want me to—?”
    “Yes, please,” he said, before she even finished, and she liked the idea of being out on the front steps in the fresh air of this mild evening, until she remembered that Harrison would be pulling up here soon, delivering Andy and his friends.
    Unless he’d stayed in Helena, because of his ex. Because the abrupt end to his date with Kate the other night had left him horny or hungry or lonely or all three, and he’d gone to Helena the next day and called her to say he was in town and they’d met up and who knew what had happened next?
    He’d taken the property off the market.
    That was fact, not just her feverish, emotional imagination.
    Her heart gave an uncomfortable lurch.
    Promptly at six-thirty, the first cars began to arrive. Just ordinary ones, mostly. Marietta High didn’t run to the streams of rented limos Kate gathered were a feature of prom night at the more sophisticated high schools in the wealthy suburbs of big cities.
    But there were a few stand-outs. One couple had painted an ancient Chevy in bright silver and gold for the occasion, and had stuck tiny mirror fragments all over it. There was a pickup truck, too, with its entire bed heaped in tinsel, and more tinsel snaking up the radio antenna and in through the windows.
    Then she saw two vintage cars coming down the street. They were both from the nineteen fifties, both lovingly maintained, impeccably finished and gleaming. They turned into the entrance at the front of the school and cruised to a slow halt right at the steps just yards from where Kate was standing. There were a couple of parents nearby, poised to take photos of their kids’ arrival, and she heard their impressed exclamations.
    “Those are beautiful!”
    “Wow, who is inside?”
    A man got out of the first car and Kate recognized Andy Pearce’s dad, Doug.
    Harrison’s brother.
    Older than Harrison, he was dressed