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nice.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Will you eat some eggs?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes. Thanks.”
    “These are my special cheesy eggs with dicey ham.”
    Th
e smell is enough, please spare me the description.
    “No, thanks, really,” she said.
    “All right. How about you two monkeys? Who wants more?”
    Angela sat at the table to drink coffee and chew at a cold triangle of toast.
    He served himself and returned the pan to the stove and sat to her left.
    “Are you excited?” he said.
    After a moment she looked up. “–I’m sorry?”
    “I said are you excited. About today. About teaching.”
    She thought how to answer, thinking for so long that he stopped chewing. He swallowed, then picked up and sipped his coffee.
    On the wall at the foot of the stairs a vintage sunburst clock ticked prodigiously. As if sound was its only mode of timekeeping.
    The children began to talk to him. He listened and smiled and talked back and she remembered the little girl—
her
little girl—coming into her bed. The firm small body pushed against her. That heat, that smell like no other.
    “I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ve got a long walk.”
    He reached and touched her then, two fingertips, lightly to the bone of her wrist, and picked up his cell phone and showed it to her. Some sort of colorful image like a bright whorl of bruise.
    “That’s something,” she said.
    “That’s rain. You should let me drive you, Angela.”
    She looked at him. His kind face. The clear blue eyes with their overcasts of worry. She knew how she must look to him. To all of them. It’s going to be all right, she wanted to say, we’re going to survive this, but at that moment behind her a step creaked, and then another, and there was the scuffing whisper of slippers over linoleum, and fingers swept the back of her head, and she watched as her younger sister made her way around the table in her robin’s-egg robe, swooping down to kiss the boy on the head, the girl on the cheek, and lastly the man, fully on the lips.
    “Good morning,” Grace said to her husband, to her children, and to
Angela. “Good morning, my loves.”

4
    The moment she walked into the classroom she knew she’d made a mistake, but some of them had already seen her and it was too late. Rebecca Woods whose mother, Anne, liked a good martini in the afternoon; Ariel Suskind with her tremendous brown eyes and a father who taught graduates at the university and who had left Ariel’s mother for one of them. Angela had a brief smile for these daughters of friends and once friends, and they had the same for her before the girls were moved to urgent doodling, to matters of the cell phone. She saw the flushing young cheek. The spill of fine hair which must be rehung behind the ear. Girls of high bloom and maturity enough to know wreckage when it stood before them but not to bear it, and in that instant she abandoned every plan she’d made and asked them to open their books please and just read, and this they did without a whisper or passed note or pen poke among them. Instead there was the mute fervency of secreted devices, messages firing lap to lap like cells along a nerve chain, and she sat out the hour staring into the paperback and letting them take her in as the news reached them one by one:
She lost her daughter in the Rocky Mountains, then she lost her mind; she was in the “hospital” for three months & now she’s our sub? Is that even like, legal?
Yes, children, here is your lesson, here is all I can teach you, until the bell sounded at last and she stood and pretended to search the contents of her tote bag while they shouldered their packs and trooped wordlessly out and—
    “Good-bye, Mrs. Courtland.”
    “Oh, good-bye, Ariel. Please tell your mother hello.”
    “I will.” The girl slowing, not quite stopping, books held to her chest, the great brown eyes. She had an older sister with the same eyes who had run track with Caitlin but