Page 12 of Hold

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Liam joined them again half an hour later. He’d changed his T-shirt and added a plaid button-down over it. Hanging open. Of course.

“You know,” David said, “you want to play Joe the Plumber, the bathroom at the garage could use an overhaul.”

Liam sat down and pointed at the bottle of wine, raising his eyebrows in question to Thea. She poured him a glass and didn’t, did not, watch his big hand grip the delicate stem.

“Not playing,” he said. “My dad’s Pat the Plumber.”

Everyone except Chloe, who lived in the city, said, “Ohhhhh.” The vans were common in the area.

Thea looked at Liam. The man would not stay in the boxes she set up for him. First, he was some hipster, bearded kid who thought he could teach. Then he was a selfish quitter who’d leave his team in the lurch. Then he was a frustrating know-it-all plumber who made her feel like crap about her house. Or a macho pain in the ass who drove around in a baby-blue truck. Or a sweet man who knew that she was alone and wanted to help. Or a source of serious discomfort every time he looked at her with those old-soul blue eyes.

They weren’t looking at her now. “So why are you a teacher?” she demanded. Why wouldn’t he stay put?

“Because I didn’t want to be a plumber,” he said simply.

“Duh,” Chloe said.

“Okay,” Thea conceded. “So why the master’s? You already know how to teach.”

He scowled at her in a way she was becoming quite used to. “I want the master’s degree to get a raise, okay? And maybe to go into administration one day. Happy now?”

“But you know how to… to plumb,” she said.

“It was the only way my dad would let me go to college,” he said. “Now can we get back to work.Please?”

They turned back to their laptops, but Thea wasn’t done. “You said you quit at Jake’s school. Sorry,” she added when he opened his mouth, “left. Do you have another job lined up?”

He gave a dramatic sigh and folded his arms. “Yes. But it’s in a school with a high percentage of immigrant and refugee kids, and I need this—”

“Ooh!” Zahra interrupted. “Where?”

“Jamaica Plain.” He didn’t scowl at her the way he did with Thea. Bastard.

“Where?” Zahra’s face had lit up. “Are you going to English?”

“No, JFK. You live there?”

Something came over Liam’s face then. The scowl was gone; he leaned forward in the hard chair he still insisted on taking. His face softened, but his eyes were keen.

“Yes! Oh, this is awesome!” Zahra clapped her hands together, and Liam smiled. Only a slight curve in the thin line of his mouth, but Thea noticed nonetheless. “I’m involved with the Somali refugee community there.” Zahra glanced around at the others. “My parents brought me over when I was five. It’s a good-sized community, and there are more asylum-seekers coming all the time. We need teachers like crazy.”

“Well,” Liam said, putting up his hands, “I haven’t had a class with a majority of non-native speakers since I was a student. I’ll have some catching up to do.”

Zahra waved that away. “Pssh. You’ve got it. You know this stuff cold. Would you like to come and meet some of the kids before school starts? Oh!” She sat back and gazed at him, her brown eyes shining, sparks of gold appearing in them from the color in her hijab. “I know two kids at least who’ll be starting high school in the fall, and it would meanso muchto them if they met you before school started!”

“I’d love to meet them,” Liam said, and damn him, he sounded serious. And happy. And focused. He was right; he didn’t want to be a plumber.Thiswas his passion.

“Can we all come?” David asked. “Do you think any of them want to come out to the garage?”

“Are you kidding?” Zahra looked at him with even more stars in her eyes than the ones she’d pointed at Liam. “We’realwayslooking for people to help them get acclimated.”

“And they could come to the gallery,” Chloe said, then quickly added, “if the collection that’s up is age-appropriate, anyway. Steph’s had a vagina phase that takes some getting used to.”

There was a mic drop instant of silence, and then they collapsed into laughter, Seth and David falling off the couch to curl up on the floor, Chloe as red as her hair, and Zahra holding her sides and yelping, “Ow! Stop! No, really! It hurts!”

Thea had tears in her eyes but saved some energy to look at Liam. He’d thrown his head back with a bark of a laugh that Thea felt through her chair, and he’d gotten that hint of pink along his cheekbones again. But he was still holding himself in, sobering long before the others, long enough to notice that she was looking at him.

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