Mr. Smartass

By Ryan Daly

You come home from work, kiss your daughter’s cheek and ask how school went today. She says, “We had a substitute who said my teacher had to get treated for gonorrhea.” Then your precious little girl gazes up at you with wide eyes full of love and rainbows, and asks, “What’s gonorrhea?”

For ruining your child’s innocence and of the the awkward conversations that follow, you can thank Alan Raff, amateur malcontent and self-proclaimed titular character of Mr. Smartass.

Alan makes his triumphant return to middle school to rock boats, burn bridges, and seduce a sexy art teacher. Along the way, he adopts a supporting cast, which includes a foul-mouthed janitor with a secret history of vandalism, a well-endowed nurse with a secret drinking problem, and an overzealous assistant principal with not-so-secret ninja fetish. To push the limit as far as he can, Alan must battle a jealous coworker, an unhappy principal, an escaped python, teen pregnancy, intolerance, and his own unresolved grief over his mother’s death—all to teach the students just one lesson that really, truly matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ryan Daly
• Release date: Feb 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465872463

Ryan Daly

Ryan Daly peaked early when voted Most Talented by his 11th grade class. Now after thirteen years, he has started living up to that title by publishing his first novel, Mr. Smartass, and managing a blog called Why I Cry. He is a writer and co-producer of the web-series K-911: The Series. He lives in Vermont with his wife, a very patient and forgiving woman.

Book preview

Dedication

To Angela,

always my favorite teacher.

Epigraph

Arm me, audacity, from head to foot!

- Cymbeline I.vi.19

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication and Epigraph

Chapter 1: Hit-and-Run Teacher

Chapter 2: Two Households

Chapter 3: The Rift

Chapter 4: Real Teachers

Chapter 5: F Words

Chapter 6: Teachable Moments

Chapter 7: The House of White

Chapter 8: The Cave, the Beast and the Lady

Chapter 9: Mrs. Udderson’s Legacy

Chapter 10: Exeunt Amber

Chapter 11: Confessions

Chapter 12: Roommate Ramses

Chapter 13: Alarums and Excursions

Chapter 14: Lonely Night at the Memory Hotel

Chapter 15: Funny Valentine

Chapter 16: Bleeding Hearts

Chapter 17: The House of Pike

Chapter 18: Matter Changing States

Chapter 19: Independent Variables

Chapter 20: Loopy

Chapter 21: Post-Op Complications

Chapter 22: Pistols at Dawn

Chapter 23: Physical Educationally Challenged

Chapter 24: Vicodin, Whiskey Chaser

Chapter 25: Till I’m Buried in My Grave

Chapter 26: Bring a Knife to a Food Fight

Chapter 27: The Law of Unintended Consequences

Chapter 28: For the Love of God, Montresor!

Chapter 29: Drinks and Denouement

Chapter 30: The Fall of Troy

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter 1

Hit-and-Run Teacher

Alan Raff prowled the parking lot for the space that would afford the quickest getaway when the bell rang at 2:30. He didn’t know why the police had come to Harrington Middle School, or why they had to hog the best parking spot. What he did know was an opportunity when he saw one, and the shattered glass window and police car at the school’s front door screamed opportunity.

Before a single bus had come to a complete stop, the sixth, seventh and eighth graders aboard lurched from their seats in egregious defiance of safety regulations to get a better look at the police car. They poured from the buses, flinging questions at each other. The sight of a uniformed officer taking pictures of the smashed-in window sent rumors into the air like drunken carrier pigeons.

Someone had broken into Harrington before, back in the first week of school, long before Alan started substitute teaching. Whoever did it stole some DVD players, ransacked the office, plundered the nurse’s medicine cabinet, and fouled the lobby for days with the stink of urine. The criminal mastermind wrote FUCK SKOOL on the wall in permanent marker, a double-blow to Harrington’s staff for the spelling as much as the sentiment.

This frigid February morning’s investigation would yield nothing so eloquent. Nothing was taken. No dissenting opinions were written on the walls in giant letters, and, aside from the broken window, there were no signs of vandalism or graffiti. The snowplows, which cleared four inches from the parking lot before dawn, had destroyed any tracks that might have led to or from the scene. A plain-clothes detective named Lankershim interviewed the administrators and the head custodian who discovered the break-in. Lankershim and the uniformed cop responding to the break-in call would hang around for an hour to flex their presence in front of the impressionable kids, then leave to pursue the zero leads they’d dug up.

By month’s end, the police would be regulars at Harrington.

Alan circled the parking lot, keeping one eye on the broken window. The kids who cut through the lot instead of walking around like they were supposed to darted out of his way when they realized he wasn’t going to stop for them. Alan didn’t slow down in school zones, he didn’t look both ways, and he didn’t yield to pedestrians; he braked for larger vehicles and women, not much else.

At twenty-two, he was young enough to remember that adolescence, to an adolescent, equaled invincibility. He felt compelled to disabuse them of that belief. Teenagers could be inarguably stupid until they started drinking and having sex with some regularity, but if they couldn’t recognize the superior size, strength and gas mileage of a Honda Civic and keep a safe distance, they deserved to be culled from the herd.

Fantasy hijacked Alan’s attention. Scenarios involving wild animals loose in the building, or an escaped convict, or, better still, something to do with terrorists blinded him to the man coming out from behind a jeep until force and momentum planted the guy on Alan’s hood.

Alan hit the brakes.

The man rolled, yelped, and disappeared under the bumper.

Time spent reflecting on the collision might have flooded Alan’s mind—a virtual, instantaneous brain-dump—with frenetic, panicky thoughts like: Jesus, I killed him! And: Where did he come from? And: What do I do? And: It’s not my fault! And: Huh, not very icy; plows must have salted. And: This can’t be good for my insurance… Unless… Nah, what are the chances this guy’s a war criminal?

He didn’t have time for such thoughts, though, only time to crack the window an inch and hear someone shout, Asshole!

The man sprang up. Alan recognized him—Mr. Bachman, eighth grade math teacher. Fear knotted in Alan’s chest, and was tempered almost immediately by the fierce impulse to laugh. Bachman, with his mouth full of saliva and teeth that expatriated from dental hygiene years ago, looked too much like the shark from Jaws popping out of the water to sink the heroes’ boat.

Bachman didn’t give Alan time to open the door and apologize before he was on his feet. He slurred and gave the Civic an open-fisted punch.

Alan knew the math teacher’s reputation for aggravating students and staff alike. And if Alan, who had only been substitute teaching since January, knew the consensus, it might as well have been published in the school newsletter. Bachman’s name never came up in conversation without the words crazy, creepy or batshit insane tacked on. His head was a bushy mess of hair, black on top, silver at the chin. He always wore paint-spattered pants and mud-crusted hiking boots. At the moment, those boots were made for walking back to his jeep.

Leaving before school started? Maybe he was fetching a gun. If any Harrington teacher had a gun stashed in his glove box, it was Bachman. Maybe he was going straight to the hospital. Alan would have to drive in the other direction and just keep driving, change his name, live a life of quiet desperation, fall for the wrong woman, probably murder her rich husband and fall again for her inevitable double-cross. Or he could deny the collision and test his credibility against a teacher reputed to throw pencils like darts at students who asked to use the bathroom.

The jeep shuddered to life, rumbled and tore out of the lot down Friend Street and away from the school. Alan forced a deep breath and turned on the defroster. The spot where Bachman slapped his hood didn’t look dented. He breathed in relief, because he couldn’t picture any tactful, self-effacing way to bill the math teacher for scuffing his paint.

Alan parked in the newly vacated space and walked to the door. The forecast called for flurries in the late afternoon and temperatures in the mid thirties all day. Not the kind of weather that students liked to stand outside in, but stand outside they did. The nearly six-hundred students of HMS packed into tight clusters, some around trees, some in the yard beneath basketball hoops, most in front of the main doors, not for the crime scene spectacle, but for warmth.

Alan muscled his way through the crowd. A few enterprising eighth graders followed his lead and tried to rush the door. Mr. Pike, the assistant principal, kept them at bay as he always did until the first bell rang.

Morning, Sergeant, Alan said, stopping by the broken window.

Mr. Pike scowled. You demoted me.

A retired Army lieutenant, Don Pike guarded the door like a star federal witness was on the other side. Behind lacquered shades, his eyes scanned the crowd of students for signs of trouble. Behind Mr. Pike was the police officer, looking apprehensive about his proximity to so many squirrelly children.

Alan pointed to the window. The school this desperate for air conditioning?

Looks like we had a break-in, Pike said, looking down at the glass like he could divine the intruder’s identity by the arrangement of glass fragments.

Not surprised, Alan said. I used to confuse this place with the methadone clinic all the time.

The officer stopped what he was doing and glared. Alan disarmed him with his trademark just-messing-with-you smirk: a smirk cultivated over ten years, a smirk beta-tested on his mother and perfected on girlfriends, bouncers, professors, store clerks, and one traffic cop.

He smirked a lot at Harrington.

Someone, a girl in the crowd, shouted to Alan, Hey, Mister Guy.

Alan didn’t take offense to students not knowing his name since the anonymity of subbing prevented kids from slandering him in the bathroom stalls.

The speaker was a shivering sixth grader whose idea of winter weather gear included a loose flannel shirt over a tank top and a denim mini-skirt. She might have been the only white girl in a cluster of older and taller Latinas, but Alan had no trouble identifying her as the Alpha of the group. Good genetics gave her a face that could someday land a magazine cover, unchecked steroids in the nation’s food gave her an almost fully developed body at age twelve, and drunk, divorced parents gave her a pair of eyes with disquieting maturity.

Shouldn’t they close school? she asked.

We’re secure, Pike said, puffing his chest a little. Trust me.

The girl and her troupe weren’t shy about rolling their eyes. The girl asked, What if the, you know, whoever broke into my locker and, like, took my stuff?

Like, you know, the library can replace your books, Alan said.

Some of the girls giggled. The alpha said, I don’t got no library books. I got a bottle of perfume in my locker cost forty dollars.

Alan checked the reflexive urge to ask if she was high. He thought he was young enough to still get this generation, but none of the girls he had known in middle school kept anything more aromatic than Bubblicious in their lockers. Don’t worry about your obscenely overpriced perfume, Alan said. Chances are nothing was stolen.

He shrugged. More likely, someone planted a bomb.

Pike groaned and shook his head, muttering something inaudible beneath the fresh excitement sweeping over the kids. He opened the door and ushered Alan inside.

Alan smirked at the cop and crushed glass beneath his shoes.

* * *

The office buzzed with activity. Teachers flitted in front of their mailboxes, picking up new staff memos. More teachers hovered over the backed-up photocopier. At one desk Mrs. Hudson conversed with a boy and his parents, the boy acting as translator for his Spanish-speaking mother and father, while across the room, Mrs. Shanley listened to a pair of brothers who forgot their lunches at home. Over all the talk, a symphony of telephones played on the secretaries’ desks and in every adjoining office.

Common knowledge, even among substitute teachers, was that Liz Shanley found the bellicosity of Harrington’s office an energizing tune. Being head secretary required a flexible mind; building order out of bedlam was in the job description. For Liz, who had been running the office more years than any of the teachers had worked there, more years than many of them had even been out of school, it was little more than an organizational chore. Listening to the brothers’ lament, she scribbled a reminder to shuffle the principal’s faculty evaluation schedule and read an email from yet another teacher who couldn’t work that day. She had already called in three subs when Alan Raff entered. Liz pulled the boys’ dad’s work number from the computer and said she’d call him during first period. When they left, she smiled at Alan and said, Good morning, sir.

Fairly well known about Liz Shanley was that she graduated from Harrington forty-three years earlier, back when it was a high school serving Lowden and its two surrounding towns. For thirty-six years, from her same corner of the office, Liz had watched the building upgrade facilities and downgrade from high school to junior high to middle school. She watched three sons and two daughters pass through the same halls. She watched staff come and go, and endured the regime changes of ten different principals. She watched, and she managed the chaos. The secret fear shared by HMS and the Board of Education was that when Liz retired the school would simply collapse. Forget bricks and mortar; she was the nerve center. Without her, the ceiling would cave in and the walls would crumble.

And still she called a twenty-two year old substitute sir. That kind of class, an old-school modesty, Alan’s mother taught him to appreciate.

Who am I today, Mrs. Shanley? he asked.

Whoever you want to be, she answered.

The first time Alan subbed at Harrington, Liz told him, Today, you’re Mister Kapelski. Wet behind the ears, a little playful and a little hung over, Alan had asked, Why can’t I be myself? This wannabe-existential exchange became ritual in the weeks since. For Alan, the appeal of subbing was self-reinvention, of taking on a different person’s job with none of their baggage or responsibility.

Liz rummaged through a filing drawer under her desk full of sub-folders and came out with an attendance sheet paper-clipped to a red folder. Mister Saddler, seventh grade Science, upstairs, room two-oh-two.

The Saddler schedule was inches from Alan’s hand when Mrs. Hudson called from across the office, Liz, Ken Bachman just went home. Need another.

Liz held the Saddler folder just out of reach. Would you rather teach math?

Taking the job of a man he had run over in the parking lot—Mother Raff would not have found that classy, no sir, but there was such a bent irony to it that Alan wavered, considered. This time, class won. Math was never my strong subject, he admitted. That’s why I only know how to add debt and subtract funds from my bank account.

Maybe the class can help you balance your check book, Liz said.

Alan smiled. All my favorite superheroes were scientists.

The first bell rang. Liz surrendered the Saddler folder and scooped up the phone to call another sub.

At the sound of the bell, hundreds of cold, agitated tweens invaded the lobby. Alan waded up the stairs in a current of crankiness, weariness, flightiness, meanness and pretentious angst. Half the kids he could see were fumbling with MP3 players or texting their friends down the hall. Some boys tossed a football with no intention of catching it, but rather seeing how many of their peers’ heads the pigskin could bounce off of before hitting the floor. The girl walking in front of Alan wore camouflage pants and a belt made of what had to be a thousand safety pins. The girl behind him wore a shirt that she had outgrown around the time she learned to walk. The tallest eighth graders matched him for height, but his caramel-colored leather jacket and general sense of balance set him apart from the students. He possessed the air of superiority exuded by adults in the presence of youth, a smugness derived from being legally obliged to do all the things kids wished they could do.

He picked up scattered parts of conversation. Talk of birthdays, talk of tests, talk of siblings, talk of underwear, and lots of talk about the break-in. Everyone wanted to know what everyone else knew. Theories were proposed; suspects were named. "Hey, Katie, you hear the police found a bomb?"

Mr. Saddler’s room was good and warm. Whitey, Harrington’s head custodian, had cranked up the heat after the broken window turned the school into a walk-in freezer. Alan sat at Mr. Saddler’s desk and went to work absorbing every part of the sub-folder he needed.

The first ten minutes of the day could be terrifying for substitute teachers. You had to figure out everything you needed to do for the rest of the day. You had to know what the day’s expectations were, where the materials were, which students you could trust and how to manage those you couldn’t. You had to know where the call/emergency button was in each room, just in case somebody fainted or somebody brought a knife. While you were figuring all this out, students were pouring into the room demanding to know who you were and why they should care. If you screwed up anything, they let you know, and their criticism was hardly constructive. All of this anticipation generated a rush that a good sub could ride for the entire day.

This day, all Mr. Saddler required of Alan was the ability to push PLAY on a remote control. When the bell rang to start class, he stood at the front of the room next to the television. He counted twenty-five bodies spread around nine tables. Two kids were absent, and of those present only a handful were facing him, and nobody was quiet.

Ladies and gentlemen, he addressed the class. Your teacher, Mister Saddler, isn’t here today because he’s dead.

A collective gasp whipped through the class. Heads spun around. Eyes bugged and jaws dropped.

Dead, a student in the front row asked, really dead?

That’s right, Alan said, then shrugged for affectation, or just sick, maybe, I don’t know. Important thing is he’s not here today. I’m Mister Raff.

Twenty-five boys and girls exhaled as one. Some laughed. Some shook their heads. Before anyone could speak, Alan began pacing the front row, pulling twenty-five sets of eyes where he walked. You’re, what, thirteen years-old, most of you? You’ve all had subs before so you know the drill. You’re expected to show me the same respect you would pretend to show your regular teacher. But you’re not expected to learn from me, which is why we’re just going to watch a movie all hour.

He stopped in front of the TV, picked up the DVD case and held it up for the class. "Today’s fine educational presentation is Jurassic Park. Have you been studying cloning or dinosaurs or biology?"

A few kids shrugged. A few said, Kind of.

Kind of, Alan repeated. Good enough for me.

Chapter 2

Two Households

Whitey followed the snowplows’ path to work. His drive took short of an hour. The sun hadn’t come up yet. Emmylou Harris’ honey lemon drawl filled the cramped cab of his pickup.

He got home late Monday night after a double-shift. He fell asleep beside the Wife at eleven, and woke five hours later to shovel the driveway before heading out. Living so far from Harrington had been a necessary evil seventeen years ago when he started as a part-timer. When he had a two year-old daughter, another on the way, and plans to marry their mother. Now, the Wife encouraged moving to a house in Lowden. Even with the oldest’s college tuition, she said they could manage it. The whole family worked or went to school there anyway, so why not?

Whitey’s reason why not, which he could never articulate to the girls, was that he loved the time alone in his truck, when he was answerable to no one. His music made the drive more than tolerable, but enjoyable. What other people got from meditation, therapy or church, Whitey got from music.

The girls got him an iPod for Christmas. They spent Winter Break first convincing Whitey that computers weren’t tools of the Devil, and then how to download songs and upload his old CD collection. By February, Whitey was enamored of the little gadget and told his daughters he’d gladly sell one of them before his iPod.

At quarter past six, he pulled up in front of HMS, where his headlights lit up the doors, the windows and all the little bits of broken glass on the ground.

He grabbed his iPod and earbuds and his toolbox from the passenger seat. He locked the truck and opened the school. Snow had been blowing in for hours. The lobby looked like some iceberg archipelago: all scattered mounds of snow that hadn’t melted yet floating in a great puddle of what had. He sloshed down the dark, Antarctic halls decorated with student art, Black History Month posters, sports trophies and ads for the upcoming Valentine’s card sale.

He went downstairs to his office by the boiler room. He flipped on the light and tossed his keys on the desk. In his statement to Detective Lankershim later that day, Whitey would omit the following: he didn’t pick up the phone and call the police right away like he was obligated to. He fed his fish first. Whitey kept several dwarf pufferfish in a thirty-gallon tank that he adopted from a retired science teacher. He checked the filter, the PH level, and then sprinkled bloodworms into the tank. The puffers were quick to breakfast.

Whitey draped his jacket over the back of his chair. He had Sara Woodson’s home number in his cell phone. He flipped through his contact list when memory brought his finger to a halt: Sara was downstate at a principal’s conference for three days.

He snapped the phone shut. Now what? he asked the fish.

Calling the police was his responsibility, but calling the principal instead had been his preference since becoming head custodian. He didn’t like cops, he didn’t like talking to cops, and he didn’t like inviting them into his building. Sara Woodson was assertive enough—and believed Whitey dumb enough—that she always made the call, after chastising him for not taking initiative.

Don Pike was the only other staff member with the executive authority to notify the police, that is, if executive authority was required, and if such a thing as executive authority even existed at the middle school level in northern Illinois. Whitey knew Pike would jump at the chance to play official around real men in uniform. He picked up the desk phone, which had the assistant principal’s number in its speed-dial. He had erased the same number from his cell, in accordance with his New Year’s resolution to never start a conversation with Pike. Oh well. His last three resolutions had involved eating healthier, finding a better job and taking the Wife to Hawaii. He was still pushing two hundred fifty pounds, still at HMS, and their last vacation was to exotic Omaha.

Thirty-eight days was a good run, he told himself, dialing.

After the second ring, a sleepy woman’s voice said, Hello.

Yeah, Don Pike there? Whitey asked, then added as a courtesy, It’s school-related.

He listened to the woman call out Donald to her husband in another room. Whitey shook his head. Donald…

Yello. Pike’s tone sounded militarily crisp.

Whitey, he identified himself. Got a broken window on the main door here. Could be somebody broke in last night. He could picture Pike’s shoulders slump and his lip curl, a bad Elvis imitation that only a pufferfish could find endearing. Pike was only halfway through his first year as assistant principal, and Whitey didn’t think he’d ever dealt with anything like this yet.

Okay, hmm, Pike said. I guess the police should be called, yeah?

Sara likes to call them herself. He paused a second for Pike to absorb that. I guess I could do it, but since you’re in charge today, I thought maybe—

I’ll do it.

Sucker.

I’ll send them right out and be there ASAP. Pike pronounced it as one word rather than four letters. Over and out.

Now it was Whitey’s turn to slump. Yeah, over and out, Donald.

* * *

The sucker, as Whitey called him, went to Mr. Saddler’s room during sixth period. He carried a coffee mug with the Department of the Army seal in one hand, his radio in the other. Don Pike had been out of the Army for twenty years but still walked with parade-ground stiffness at work. His hair was brown, not quite shaved, but close. He’d filled out a decent paunch in civilian life.

He stopped in the doorway. The students sat up, looked at the TV, appearing dutiful and inconspicuous while keeping a peripheral view of Mr. Pike. He soaked up the attention, knowing that in the mind of the class, his mere presence meant somebody was in trouble. He might as well have come dressed in fatigues, brandishing an assault rifle.

Then a Tyrannosaurus roared, and Lieutenant Pike flinched. Coffee splashed his shirt. The class erupted. A boy in the back row said, Smooth. Someone else said, It’s just a movie, it can’t hurt you, which brought another torrent of laughter from the kids.

Without his shades nothing could shield the menace in his eyes. He pointed the radio antenna like a weapon. It didn’t take him long to recover. He puffed himself up to fill the doorframe and glared.

Glad you found that funny, he said to no one in particular. You can tell everyone in detention how funny it was.

The threat silenced the laughter but couldn’t undo the damage. None of the students could look at each other for fear of cracking up. They covered their mouths to hide their still-beaming grins. They shrank away as he walked around. Alan got up from Saddler’s desk and met him at the back of the room.

What are you doing tonight around five? Pike whispered.

Why do you ask?

Pike set his coffee mug down on the back counter and checked the stains on his sleeve in the window light. We got a three-on-three basketball game every week. After work, before dinner, just guys from the building.

This surprised Alan. His contact with Harrington staff had been limited so far, but the impression he’d formed was that they mostly felt the same animosity toward each other that Whitey felt toward Pike. A weekly basketball game rang contrary to his image of an antisocial faculty.

Bill Saddler usually plays with us but he’s sick. There aren’t many guys in the building to begin with. And some of them irritate the hell out of me. So if you want we’ll let you in tonight.

Wow. You really know how to flatter a guy, Colonel.

You’ll do it?

Five o’clock?

Affirmative.

Pike glared at the class one final time from the doorway and then disappeared down the hall. Alan snatched the remote and pressed PAUSE just as a T-Rex was pounding the shit out of an Explorer filled with whiny kids.

You all get extra credit, Alan announced, if you tell your friends about Mister Pike getting scared by the movie.

* * *

The three-on-three faculty game was a Harrington tradition going back five whole years. Don Pike inherited the game from the assistant principal before him, who inherited it from the assistant principal before him, who played one game before a botched back surgery forced him off the court and into early retirement. As with school security, family vacations, and church attendance, Pike treated the basketball game with a seriousness bordering on zeal. He scheduled which night of the week the guys played, what kind of attire players were supposed to wear, and how long they could be in the gym before the night custodian needed to sweep. He had been coordinating with the high school to arrange a real game sometime that spring.

Filling the other five slots with men forced Pike to scrape the pool of all but two teachers: Tom Guffey, the boys P.E. teacher, currently remanded to a wheelchair; and Ken Bachman, who was never invited to any school functions ever. Those who made the cut were Martin Lorenzo, the special ed. teacher and co-captain; John Qin, one of the guidance counselors; Scott Kapelski, the computer teacher; Bill Saddler, and Whitey.

When Alan showed up dressed in sweats, Lorenzo clapped his hands once and said, All right, we got six. Let’s get started.

Pike put his hand on the shoulder of a kid who was taller than half the guys, older than any middle school student, but a still a kid. This is my son, Jason, Pike said. He’s subbing for Whitey. Misha called in sick again, so Whitey’s pulling another double-shift.

Alan shook hands with everybody. Pike and Lorenzo flipped a coin for teams. Lorenzo won and picked Jason. Pike grimaced and picked Kapelski. Lorenzo picked Qin. Alan defaulted to Pike’s team.

He lined up opposite John Qin, who asked if he played ball much. Not since I was eighteen, Alan admitted.

What was that, two weeks ago? Qin asked, laughing a bit heartier than perhaps the joke warranted.

Alan got a basketball hoop for his eleventh birthday. It went above the garage door. He spent hours shooting hoops with his mom after dinner. Kelly Raff played HORSE while she grilled her son about all he’d learned in school.

What’d you do in Science? she would ask.

Anatomy of plant cells, Alan would answer.

Plant cells, huh? She eyed the hoop. Her eyebrows tended to arch above the bridge of her nose, making