Third Degree

an Athens Point native who had left town at eighteen and returned as a prodigal, thirty years down the road. All he’d told her during the first weeks of Michael’s assessment was that he’d flown helicopters in a couple of wars, that he was now retired due to wounds received, and that he was giving “fixed-wing” flying lessons out at the county airport. Laurel soon decided that either flying or combat experience must be good training for men dealing with special kids, because in nine years of teaching, she had never seen a father work harder to connect with a developmentally challenged son than did Danny McDavitt.

The problem was his wife.

The only mystery about Starlette McDavitt was why Danny had married her. This single act betrayed a serious lapse of judgment, which seemed uncharacteristic in him. Of course Laurel had noticed that even brilliant men could be out-and-out fools when it came to picking women. They were like little boys at a Baskin-Robbins. I’ll have some of THAT. Hmm, that tastes good, I want some more. Pretty soon, they bought the whole bucket of ice cream, to keep a steady supply. But once they had access to that bucket all day every day, they didn’t like the taste so much. That ice cream didn’t even look the same as it had behind the frosted glass with the big silver scoop stuck in it.

Starlette looked tasty enough, and her looks matched her name. She was a former Miss Knoxville or something, not quite a Miss Tennessee, but something higher up than a Soybean Queen. Yet her TV spokesmodel beauty was offset by bitter eyes that told you she’d already learned the lesson that pageant victories only take girls a short way down the road of life. The real irony was that in Starlette’s view, Laurel had won the marital lottery. She’d married a doctor-count your blessings and keep your mouth shut, honey (and your legs open, if you know what’s good for you). Starlette had never verbalized any of this per se, but it had seeped out between her little digs at other doctors’ wives (none present to defend themselves) and in her limited observations on her own lot in life.

Danny had married Starlette seven years ago, a year before he’d planned to retire from the air force. First marriage for both of them. He’d waited a long time to make that mistake, he told her, but the waiting hadn’t made him any wiser. After nineteen years in the service, he’d flown to Nashville to buy a house in anticipation of working as a songwriter in his retirement, something he’d always done during downtime in the air force. To protect his savings, he’d lined up a job with a local flying service. The owner was a big admirer of Danny’s war record, and one job perk was flying country music stars around the state. Starlette had been working for a real estate agency, and she’d showed Danny a couple of houses in Franklin. His songwriting aspirations hadn’t impressed her; in fact she’d questioned his ability to buy in that neighborhood. But his upcoming gig flying country music stars had the glamour she’d come to the city to find. Danny still had a year left at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to round out his twenty, but he was soon commuting to Nashville on every leave, to shop his songs and to spend time with Starlette. When she turned up pregnant, they decided to marry, and six months later, their daughter, Jenny, was born-beautiful and healthy.

Danny was only two weeks from retirement when the World Trade Center was attacked. After that, he’d refused to consider quitting, despite Starlette’s protestations. She didn’t have to wait long for his return. He deployed to Afghanistan but was shot down three months later, in an incident he was lucky to survive. He took this as a hint from fate and returned to Nashville with his discharge papers in hand. Soon he was dividing his time between flying singers, selling songs, sleeping with his new wife, and raising his daughter. The only problem in paradise was that he quickly tired of being a flying chauffeur. Jet-set hillbillies were getting on his nerves. Some were truly wonderful people, but others were real jerks. With the fans they were warm and sincere, but as soon as they hit the chopper, they were bitching about the hassles of dealing with the public. After six months without selling a song, Danny was ready to bail out. He hadn’t returned to Mississippi except for funerals and one high school reunion he’d enjoyed, but ever since he hit forty-five, he’d had an inexplicable itch to head back South. The next time a singing cowboy millionaire said the wrong thing, Danny told him off, and that was that. It took some talking, but he finally convinced Starlette to give his hometown a try, promising that if it didn’t work out, they could move back to Tennessee.

Laurel set aside Michael McDavitt’s file and forced herself to stop thinking about his father. Her strategy had been to focus on the conference after Starlette, and all she had done was rewind to the beginning of her relationship with Danny. God, was she messed up.

She pulled out her file on Carl Mayer, her most serious ADD case, and tried to focus on the words and numbers on the page. Mean, median, stanine…no matter how hard she stared, the data wouldn’t coalesce into anything coherent. And why should it? In less than five minutes, she would be face-to-face with a woman she had willfully betrayed for almost a year. A woman who had never liked her, probably out of anxiety about being judged a bad parent. There was no way to avoid making those kinds of judgments, but Laurel always tried to keep them out of her eyes. The problem was, she didn’t respect Starlette McDavitt. Most of the mothers Laurel worked with bordered on sainthood when it came to dealing with their children; Starlette was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Laurel didn’t think she could have betrayed a woman she respected, although that might just be wishful thinking. As Danny had often said, you never knew what you would do until life tested you.

A soft knock sounded at the door, which should have given her a moment’s warning, but she was so busy putting up her defenses that she forgot Starlette always made grand entrances. So Laurel was totally unprepared when Danny McDavitt stepped into her classroom looking like a man hovering in some netherworld between life and death.

Chapter 3

“I’m sorry,” Danny said, closing the door behind him. “Starlette wouldn’t come.”

“Why not?” Laurel almost whispered.

Danny shrugged and shook his head. You know what she’s like, said his eyes.

“She found an excuse not to come.”

He nodded. “I had to cancel a flying lesson to get here.”

Laurel studied him without speaking. She hadn’t laid eyes on Danny for a week, and then she’d only caught a glimpse of him in his beat-up pickup truck, dropping Michael at the front door. The pain of not seeing Danny was unlike anything she had ever known, a hollow, wasting ache in her stomach and chest. She felt purposeless without him, as though she’d contracted an insidious virus that sapped all her energy-Epstein-Barr, or one of those. She was glad she’d been sitting down when he opened the door.

“Should I come in or what?” he asked diffidently.

Laurel shrugged, then nodded, not knowing what else to do.

She watched him walk toward the rows of miniature chairs near the back wall. He’s avoiding the table, she realized, giving me time to adjust. Danny moved with an easy rhythm, even when he looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten for days. He stood an inch under six feet, with wiry muscles and a flat stomach despite his age. With his weathered face and year-round tan, he looked like what he was: a workingman, not a guy who had grown up privileged, moving from private school to college fraternity to whatever professional school he could get into. The son of a crop duster, Danny had gone to college on a baseball scholarship but quit after his second season to join the air force. There he’d aced some aptitude tests and somehow gotten into flight school. He was no pretty boy, but most women Laurel knew were attracted to him. His curly hair was gray at the temples but dark elsewhere, and he didn’t have it colored. It was his eyes that pulled you in, though. They were deep-set and gray with a hint of blue, like the sea in northern latitudes, and they could be soft or hard as the situation demanded. Laurel had mostly seen them soft, or twinkling with laughter, but they sometimes went opaque when he spoke of his wife, or when he answered questions about the battles he’d survived. Danny was in every respect a man, whereas most of the males Laurel knew, even those well over forty, seemed like aging college boys trying to find their way in a confusing world.

He turned one of the little chairs around and sat astride it, placing the back between them, as if to emphasize their new state of separation. His gray-blue eyes watched her cautiously. “I hope you’re not angry,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come, but it wouldn’t have looked right if one of us hadn’t.”

“I don’t know what I am.”