Page 4 of An Adventure For Aster

“Thank God,” she said. When the door opened a second later and Tyler rushed out, she asked, “Did you wash your hands?”

“Oops,” Tyler said and turned back to do it.

“Want me to check on that too?” he asked.

“I’ve got it covered,” she said, pulling out hand sanitizer from her pocket. “Germs are a big thing with me.”

He raised his eyebrow at her. “Maybe teaching kids wasn’t the best career path then.”

“I’m not that bad,” she said, smiling. Her eyes lit up like it was a joke of some kind. “Just that I don’t want them getting each other sick, and since they are six, they don’t necessarily do what they are told or do it well.”

Tyler came out of the bathroom wiping his wet hands on his jeans even though Aster knew there were paper towels in there.

When Tyler held his hands out to his teacher, Aster realized this was a classroom norm.

She spritzed the sanitizer on Tyler’s hands and he rubbed them together for a count of five and then ran toward the group of his classmates that could be seen through the big window.

“You must go through a lot of that stuff.”

“I do,” she said. “But the kids like the way it smells and want to use it.”

He’d noticed it wasn’t one of the plain generic kinds that the school districts most likely provided. It looked like a bottle of the stuff produced at the plant he worked at.

“That’s a good way to get them to use it,” he said, opening the door for her to walk out and join her students.

He moved past her and helped Carter talk about the fire truck, then gave a tour of the firehouse and let the kids try to pick up hoses and honk some horns, even sprayed water at targets for the kids to see how fast and hard the water came out.

The kids were giggling, the teachers were smiling, but he only had eyes for the young Ms. Scarsdale.

Though he didn’t think she was all that young. She could just look it because she was so small.

At the end of the two hours, the kids were on the bus and he and Carter returned the firehouse to shape before he changed out of his gear and back into his work clothes.

“That was one of the best school visits ever,” Carter said. “You should do them all. I never thought to put the target up and try to spray it.”

“Kids just like to be engaged,” he said. It was the simple things he learned from his years in the service. In many of those poor countries, the kids barely had more than two changes of clothing, and toys were few and far between.

Maybe he used some of his money to buy stuff for the community center. He didn’t have enough to give every family or every child something, but he could keep the activity centers full when he was there.

It’s not like he had much more to do with it and he wasn’t going to give it to his parents to waste on partying with their friends.

“So I noticed,” Carter said. “I’ll use that next time I have to do one of these.”

Aster left after that and went to the plant.

“How did it go?” Zane asked him. The crews were just getting to work, and though he didn’t work for Zane’s construction company anymore, he joined in to try to get this expansion done. Lily might be his boss, but she’d deferred his work at this point to fall under Zane.

He might have found it confusing, but since Zane was the one who oversaw all the maintenance on the building anyway, he had to start somewhere.

He was slowly getting everything in order and set up in a good routine. The floor and shift managers were learning to come to him with concerns or problems with machines. He’d been able to fix most on his own, or with a few calls to the companies. Something Zane hadn’t had the time to do and it would halt production.

“It was good,” he said. “The kids were laughing the whole time.”

“You always were good that way,” Zane said. “I want to say I’m surprised you don’t have a few yourself by now, but you’d have to settle down for that. Unless you’ve got a few out there you don’t know about.”

He laughed when Zane said that. There was always this ease and comfort he had around people he knew well. Those he didn’t, he kept it in more.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said. “And yeah, I never felt like I could put some woman through the life.”

---