Page 17 of Hold

He stuck one hand in his jeans pocket and used the other to scratch his beard. “You’re welcome, Thea.”

“Everyone calls me T,” she said before she noticed she was doing it. It wasn’t true. Only her family called her T. She hadn’t asked any of the rest of the group to do that. Her cheeks heated. She should be having him call her by her last name if she was going to put any distance between them at all. More than the couple of feet that separated them right now, anyway.

“Okay,” he said. A silence fell over them—if the sound made by the old, buzzing air conditioner in the window could be called silence.

“We never got to the toilet,” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll come over early again next week. And can I fix that a/c unit? It just needs a couple of shims.”

She closed her eyes.Stop helping me. “You don’t have to.”

“Oh, yeah, I do.” His old acerbity rose back to the surface. “I always have a headache when I leave here.”

Her face grew hotter, but she said in a flippant tone, “Sounds about right. This house is one big headache.”

He frowned; he was taking her seriously. “Still,” she went on, a smile tagging the corner of her mouth, “It’s a roof over our head, so I’m not complaining.”

“Why did you buy it, with all the work it needed?”

She tried not to take offense. Failed, but anyway. “I hardly saw it before we bought it. I’d just had Benji and dumped my ex—temporarily—and my brother and sister found it for me. I barely remember walking through it before I signed the papers. I just wanted a place that was ours: mine and the boys’. Everything basically worked, it had three bedrooms, and I didn’t think beyond that.”

He scrubbed a hand through his beard. “It’s a nice old house.”

Thea nodded at the powder-blue truck that waited patiently at the curb. “You like old things, huh.”

That slash of a smile appeared again, and Thea grinned back. “Yeah,” he said, his eyes reflecting his smile. “I guess so.”

♦

They all had final papers to plan. Thea was sad that the class was coming to an end. After this, they would be doing an online technology in the classroom class, and when fall started, they’d be following their own specialties. She had looked forward to these classes more than any of her undergrad courses because of her new friends—she could call the rest of them friends, even if she didn’t know how to categorize Liam, who had yet to show any pleasure in her company.

Everyone was coming to teaching from other careers. Chloe had floated around a few jobs before she’d met her wife, whose gallery she had been running for several years. “But she’s being kind, letting me run it,” Chloe admitted. “I’m crap at it. Washing the windows, that I can do. Rent agreements and commissions, blech. But when we got the special needs kids in for classes, I felt useful for the first time in my life.”

Zahra had been a secretary until she’d stayed home to have her babies. “It was the recession.” She shrugged. “You took what you could get.”

“The having babies part or the secretary part?” Thea asked with a grin.

Zahra smiled back at her. “Some days I wonder.”

Seth wanted to teach shop part-time and get more high school kids into the garage. David was an evangelist for teaching kids financial literacy and had already asked the group if they had IRAs.

Then there was Liam. “Did you always want to teach?” Chloe asked him during the break that night. Zahra and Thea had compared notes to bring snacks they could all share.

“Yep,” he said with his usual loquaciousness.

“Wow,” Chloe said, which was what everyone was thinking. “How did you know so early?” She indicated the rest of them. “We’ve all been floundering here, ‘finding ourselves”—she did finger quotes—“and you’ve always known?”

“Yeah,” Thea said, speaking before he could. “I can believe it. The second Jake comes in the room, you’re like a sheepdog puppy with his first sheep. You just get this… focus around kids.”

“Don’t tease him, Thea,” Zahra chided, while Liam avoided her eyes.

“Puppy?” he said. “How old do you think I am?”

“Old enough,” Chloe broke in. “Right, Thea?”

Now Thea and Liam were both blushing. “Chloe, have a heart,” Seth said.

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