The double doors burst open to the school then, and Carl the janitor locked them into place. In a minute or so, the first kids would begin to trickle out, and then it would become a colorful, frisking tide.
“That’s what I’d rescue from a burning building, by the way. That baseball. What about you? House is on fire, you have two seconds, you grab...”
“Let’s see. Well, Annelise isn’t technically a possession... because I can’t sell her on eBay, though pre-broccoli-eating days, I’ve been tempted to do that once or twice. And Peace and Love isn’t a possession, he just kind ofletsus take care of him...”
“Peace and Love is your well-loved cat, right?”
“Mmm-hmm. Daughter, cat. As long as we get out together, we’re good.”
“That’s all you need, huh?”
The question was light. But it fell on her ears a little bit like a test she wasn’t certain she’d crammed for yet.
Crap.
And then all at once she remembered Gabe snatching that kid out of harm’s way, and suddenly she knew the right thing to say. The thing he needed to hear. The thing she wanted him to know.
“If you’re the person standing outside the burning room, we’ll have nothing to worry about. We’ll get out okay.”
He said nothing. Leaned back from the car.
Just looked at her as if maybe seeing her for the first time, and his expression, the sort of amused wonder in it, made her heart skip.
“He’s proud of you, Gabe,” she said suddenly. “Your dad.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a mom now. It confers certain superpowers. So I know.”
He quirked the corner of his mouth.
They both looked at the door of the school.
Ten, nine, eight, seven...
Suddenly Gabe said, “So do you consider yourself com—”
FOOSH! An explosion of life and energy as kids began pouring out of the school, and Gabe took a step toward the kids and back from the car, and Eden could already see Annelise, her colty-legged darling, the pink streak in her hair glowing, racing toward them. She popped the locks as Annelise hopped in.
Gabe stepped back from the car to make sure everyone and everything was in his view and safe, and as she pulled away before the moms could start honking at her, she had no doubt that it was.
Chapter 8
Jan Pennington was startled but pleased to get a call from Principal Gabe Caldera two days later, on the day after a substitute was found for Ray the parking monitor.
“Well, certainly, Gabe, we can always use another hand on the carnival decorating committee, if you’d like to stop in, or if you’d just like to see how things are going. We start at around six. We’ll be in the cafeteria for a couple of hours. You can find us there.”
He couldjustabout fit a few minutes of that in if he grabbed a sandwich and ate at his desk. And maybe showed up at tonight’s board meeting at the first break, instead of right when it started.
When he arrived at the cafeteria about a quarter after six, about a dozen women were arrayed around big slabs of poster board and sheets of butcher paper spread out in the middle of the cafeteria floor.
Over in the corner, a few little girls, Annelise Harwood and Caitlynn Pennington among them, were sitting at a lunch table pulled out for the occasion, mounds of backpacks flung about the floor and what looked like a selection of dolls in the middle of the table. Much giggling was going on.
He didn’t know what it said about him that he spotted Eden pretty much immediately, even though he couldn’t see her face: on her hands and knees, butt up in the air, from the looks of things meticulously stenciling a big “F” in metallic gold.
It was worth blowing a hole in his schedule for that charming view alone.
He was a mature adult, but he was a man, and he forgave himself for standing there, kind of mentally measuring each of her cheeks and comparing it to the span of his hands. By his calculations, if he pulled her body into his and slid his palms down to cup it, the fit would be about flawless.