“Good morning, Abby,” the class signed back.
Abby looked around the room. There were twelve children in this class. She recognized nine of them. Three were new. The children ranged in age from six to thirteen. They spent a lot of their early years in this class and then were slowly integrated into regular classrooms when they were able. The range of hearing loss varied greatly and some students were able to spend most of their time in the regular classroom, while some were profoundly deaf and had other learning disabilities as well and spent most of their time in Room 12 with their two teachers, Ms. McCallum and Ms. Jones.
Abby made her way around the room, reacquainting herself with the veterans and trying to get to know the new ones, to put them at ease.
“They love it when you come here,” said Rita McCallum. “It makes a change for them from looking at our two faces all the time.”
“I love it here,” said Abby. “The kids are great. What’s up with Sasha?”
“Oh, you noticed. Sasha had kind of a bad summer.” Rita went on to describe Sasha Braxton’s situation. She was an orphan, brought over to America by adoptive parents, who had gone through enormous trials to get her into the country. ‘Bring me your tired, your poor…’ had not translated into ‘bring me your disabled’ and there were mountains of red tape to get through. The Braxtons had persevered and finally brought Sasha home. She had spent last year in the class and had thrived, learning English sign language rapidly. Since she had been virtually ignored at the orphanage in Rumania, there wasn’t a lot of her native language to be undone and Sasha soaked up the new words like a sponge. By the end of school, she’d been a happy, smiling, signing child.
Over the summer, her adoptive mother had taken her back to Rumania. Sophia Braxton hoped to adopt another child and wanted to have Sasha there to interact with the choices so that she could get one that was compatible. Some bureaucratic snafu had made it impossible for Sophia to bring Sasha out of the country once she had concluded her business there. They had spent the summer cooped up in a hotel room in Bucharest while Sophia fought it out with the civil servants in Rumania and her husband Gregory did the same in America. It had been a frightening experience for Sasha and she had lost her happy demeanor.
Abby listened to the sad story. “Poor Sasha,” she said. Then she brightened. “But I’m sure it won’t be long before you have her smiling again.” Abby paused. Then she gathered up her courage. “I wrote a story…for the kids. I wonder if I could tell it to them. Would you mind?”
“Of course not. That would be wonderful.”
“Well, I don’t know if wonderful is the word we’re looking for here. I don’t know if it’s any good. But I’m sure the children will be polite, at least.”
“I’m sure it’s lovely,” said Rita, unaware that she’d just pushed a hot button and now had Abby quivering with doubt. Rita moved to the light switch and turned it on and off. The children immediately folded their hands together in front of them and looked at their teacher.
“Come to the circle,” she signed. “Abby is going to tell you a story.”
Abby sat in the rocking chair and looked at the eager faces in front of her. She leaned forward and raised her hands. “Once upon a time,” she said and her hands made the signs, “there was a princess named Penelope.” She fingerspelled the name carefully and then gave a sign for it. From then on in the story, she used the sign for the name, rather than spelling it. “Penelope was not a happy princess. She was not a lucky princess. It seemed as if everything bad always happened to Princess Penelope. She was used to it, but she didn’t like it. Whenever something would happen, she would sigh and say, ‘why me’?” Abby made the sign for ‘why’, touching her fingers to her forehead and then pulling them out into the letter ‘y’. Then she pointed at herself. “Why me?” she repeated and exaggerated the sign.
Rita McCallum and Susan Jones stood off to the side, watching the story unfold. Before long, the children were joining in, signing ‘Why me?’ along with Abby. Those who had speech repeated the phrase with her.
Abby told the story with an exaggerated voice and big, bold gestures. By the time she finished the story and Princess Penelope had managed to rescue herself, the children were all laughing. Abby looked over at the teachers and was surprised to see tears rolling down their cheeks. They were laughing so hard they had to hold themselves up by leaning on the book cart.
“The End,” signed Abby and the children all broke into applause…hearing-impaired applause, which is not clapping the hands together but holding your hands in the air and waggling them. The recess bell rang and Ms. Jones flipped the lights on and off. The children lined up obediently and headed out to the yard to play. Several of them hugged Abby on the way out.
“Omilord, that was the funniest story,” said Rita to Abby as she plugged in the kettle to make tea.
“It wasn’t that funny,” said Abby. “But the kids liked it.”
“It was a story on two levels,” said Susan. “It was a kid story, but there was a lot there for the grownups as well. You’re a natural. I hope you write more.”
Abby shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I was just putting in time on the weekend. But I do have a couple of other ideas…things that I thought I would put in this story, but then they didn’t fit. Maybe Princess Penelope will have to have another adventure.”
“I hope so,” said Rita, setting out mugs and spoons.
“So what did you do this summer, Abby?” asked Susan. The blush that crept up Abby’s neck said it all. “You met someone, didn’t you?”
Abby put her hands to her cheeks. She could feel the heat. She shook her head from side to side, disgusted with herself for blushing. Then she nodded shyly. “Yes, I did.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Rita. “Who is he? What does he do? Is he from around here?”
“I…he…it’s just starting…I don’t know…” Abby didn’t want to say it. She liked these people and she didn’t want to lie to them.
“That’s okay,” said Rita. “I didn’t mean to pry. But I’m happy for you, I want you to know that.”
“Me too,” said Susan.
“Thank you,” said Abby. “I’m happy for myself. I just keep pinching myself because I can’t believe it’s true.”
And that part was certainly true. Abby hadn’t heard from Nick since last Tuesday. She didn’t know if she was supposed to hear from him. They hadn’t gotten all the rules clear. She figured she needed to know where he was and what he was doing, in case someone asked, but she wasn’t sure that was part of the deal. She thought about emailing him to ask, but decided not to. As soon as he emailed her again…if he emailed her again, she would put all these questions to him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Nick woke up on Monday morning because the phone would just not SHUT UP!!! He grabbed it and growled into the receiver.
“Hey, back up the truck!” exclaimed Mary. “What’s your problem? I figured you’d be up and going. Don’t you have Luke at nine?”
Nick squinted at the clock. It was 8:38. “Aw, fuck! Sorry, Mary! I overslept.”
“There’s this new invention. It’s called an alarm clock.”
“Yeah, yeah, ha, ha!” Nick scrambled around the room, throwing on workout clothes. “What’s up?”
“I’ve set up a house appraisal for two o’clock. You don’t have to be there. In fact, it’s probably better if you’re not. You’re still serious about this, selling the house, I mean.”
“The sooner the better,” said Nick, trying to hold the phone with his chin, while he pulled on sweat socks.
“Well, the house doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be reasonably neat. Is Mrs. Marchesa coming in this morning?”
“What are you implying?” laughed Nick, taking the stairs three at a time. He bounced into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Hang on.” He drank almost a quart of orange juice in one swallow. “Okay. Yes, Mrs. M. will be in today. The house is already spotless. I’ve only been back since yesterday. I was out on the boat. I started a list, by the way…like an inventory kind of thing…you know, going through the rooms and writing down what’s there.”
“Why?” asked Mary.
“I guess I was just trying to decide what I wanted to keep. My next house isn’t going to be a big, ugly, empty thing like this one.”
Score one more for the maturity side of Nick, thought Mary with relief. It was about time. “And?”
“I’m not keeping much,” he said. “Where did I get all this crap anyway?’
“Well, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. There is such a thing as storage.”
“I didn’t understand one word of that,” said Nick, grabbing his wallet and car keys. “I gotta go. I’m late.”
“I just mean…” said Mary. She wanted to get this out. “I know why you’re selling the house. But you’ve got stuff there that you’ve accumulated over the years and that you might want to have twenty years from now. Don’t throw everything out just because…”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” He paused. “Seriously, Mary. Thanks for your help on this. And yeah, I’m not going to throw anything out if it means something to me. I gotta go.”
He rang off and headed for his car. He meant to leave a message for Mrs. Marchesa asking her what she’d done with his computer, but he was running late. Damn! Luke Tremayne had a reputation for being a tough trainer. Being late on his very first day was probably not a good idea! Nick backed the car out of the driveway and wished he knew how to drive through L.A. streets the way Abby did through Chicago traffic.
