how you keep fooling them.”
They talked trash for a while, then Radcliff said,
“Sandy’s making her cold-weather chili for lunch. Why don’t you come home with me? She’d love to see you.”
“Thanks, Paul, but Cal’s teacher said I could eat lunch with them.” He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which, I’d better get back over to the school. See you at Easter.”
Weird, thought Dwight, the way all school cafeterias smell the same. Like the ones of his boyhood, this one smelled of overcooked broccoli with a substratum of sweet rolls or fruit cobbler even though today’s vegetables were a choice of lima beans or carrots and the dessert was chocolate pudding. He sat at a table with Cal and his classmates and answered the questions the children posed. But his son seemed a little subdued and only picked at his food.
When Miss Jackson stood, signaling the end of their lunch period, Cal hung back and Dwight said, “Okay then, buddy. I’ll try to get up again as soon as I can and we’ll—”
“Can I go back with you?” Cal blurted. “Today? For the weekend?”
“Today? But your mother—”
“She won’t care. Please, Dad.”
“What’s going on here, Cal?”
The boy shook his head. “Nothing. I just want to go home with you. See Grandma and Miss Deborah.”
“You know she did say you could drop the Miss and just call her Deborah now,” Dwight said, stalling for time to consider what lay behind Cal’s urgency.
“I know. I keep forgetting. I’m sorry.”
“Son, it’s nothing to be sorry about. Tell you what. I’ll go talk to your mother. If she says it’s okay, then sure.”
The boy’s relief was so evident that it only increased Dwight’s concern, but he let Cal rejoin his class and glanced down at his watch. Deborah should be on her own lunch break about now and he touched her speed dial number.
She answered on the first ring. “So tell me. What was so urgent that Cal wanted you there this morning?”
“Show-and-tell,” he said dryly.
“Show-and-tell what?”
“Me.”
He waited till she quit laughing and said, “He wants to come home with me for the weekend. That okay with you?”
“You know it is. I’ll call Kate and see if Mary Pat and Jake want to do a sleepover tomorrow night.”
“He’d like that,” said Dwight.
A few years earlier, his brother Rob had married Kate Honeycutt, a widow with a newborn son and the guardianship of a young cousin who was only six months older than Cal. They were expecting their first child together any day now. Although Deborah and Cal were slowly reforging the comfortable relationship that had existed before the engagement, having the other children around helped ease the residual stiffness between them.
“Maybe you should wait till I can get up with Jonna 3 and clear it with her first. I’ll call you back as soon as I see her, okay?”
“Whatever. This is going to put you home awfully late, though, isn’t it?”
“I promise I’ll keep it three miles over the speed limit the whole way.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wow! That means you’ll be pulling in the driveway any minute now.”
He laughed and her voice was warm in his ear.
“Love you,” she said softly.
“Hold that thought,” he said. “I may even set the cruise control for four miles over the limit.”
Although Jonna had never worked for money until after the divorce, she now held a part-time job at a historic house that had been built by one of her ancestors, but her schedule was too erratic for Dwight to keep up with.
He called her home phone and got the answering machine. No luck with her cell phone number either. According to her server, “The customer you have called is not available at this time. Please try your call later,” which probably meant she had switched it off.
He frowned at that. Why would she turn it off when Cal might need to call her?
Next he tried the number at the Morrow House. A recording informed him that winter hours were only on the weekend or by appointment. “Please call between the hours of ten and four on Saturday or one to five on Sunday. Thank you.”
Rather than keep punching in numbers on the keypad, Dwight drove the short distance to the house. No sign of Jonna’s car, and she did not answer the door when he rang.
Her mother’s house was but a few blocks closer to the center of town, so he tried there next.
