No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [9]
“Who makes fun of you?” I asked.
“Everybody,” Grace said.
“Everybody,” I repeated. “What did they do? Did they call an assembly? Did the principal stand up there and tell everyone to make fun of you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
Okay, that was true. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get an idea how widespread this problem is. I’m guessing it’s not everybody. It just feels like everybody. And even if it’s only a few, I understand that can still be pretty embarrassing.”
“It is.”
“Is it your friends?”
“Yeah. They say Mom treats me like I’m a baby.”
“Your mom’s just being careful,” I said. “She loves you very much.”
“I know. But I’m eight.”
“Your mom just wants to know that you get to school safely, that’s all.”
Grace sighed and bowed her head defeatedly, a lock of her brown hair dropping in front of her brown eyes. She used her spoon to move some Cheerios around in the milk. “But she doesn’t have to walk me to school. Nobody’s mom walks them to school unless they’re in kindergarten.”
We’d been through this before, and I’d tried talking to Cynthia, suggested as gently as possible that maybe it was time for Grace to fly solo now that she was in third grade. There were plenty of other kids to walk with, it wasn’t as though she’d be walking all by herself.
“Why can’t you walk me instead?” Grace asked, and there was a bit of a glint in her eye.
The rare times when I had walked Grace to school, I’d fallen behind the better part of a block. As far as anyone knew, I was just out for a stroll, not actually keeping an eye on Grace, making sure she got there safely. And we never breathed a word of it to Cynthia. My wife took me at my word, that I’d walked with Grace, right alongside her, all the way to Fairmont Elementary School, and stood on the sidewalk until I’d seen her go inside.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be at my school by eight. If I walk you to school before I go, you have to hang around outside for an hour. Your mom doesn’t start work till ten, so it’s not a problem for her. Once in a while, when I get a first period spare, I can walk you.”
In fact, Cynthia had arranged her hours at Pamela’s so that she’d be around each morning to make sure Grace was off to school safely. It had never been Cynthia’s dream to work at a women’s clothing store owned by her best friend from high school, but it allowed her to work part-time, which meant she could be home by the time school let out. In a concession to Grace, she didn’t wait for her at the school door, but down the street. Cynthia could see the school from there, and it didn’t take her long to spot our often-pigtailed daughter in the crowd. She had tried persuading Grace to wave, so that she could pick her out even sooner, but Grace had been stubborn about complying.
The problem came when some teacher asked the class to stay after the bell had rung. Maybe it was a mass detention, or some last-minute homework instructions. Grace would sit there, panicking, not because Cynthia would be worrying, but because it might mean her mom, worried by the delay, would come into the school and hunt her down.
“Also, my telescope’s broken,” Grace said.
“What do you mean, it’s broken?”
“The thingies that hold the telescope part to the standy part are loose. I sort of fixed it, but it’ll probably get loose again.”
“I’ll have a look at it.”
“I have to keep a lookout for killer asteroids,” Grace said. “I’m not going to be able to see them if my telescope is broken.”
“Okay. I said I’ll look at it.”
“Do you know that if an asteroid hit the Earth it would be like a million nuclear bombs going off?”
“I don’t think it’s that many,” I said. “But I take your point, that it would be a bad thing.”
“When I have nightmares about an asteroid hitting the Earth, I can make them go away if I’ve checked before I go to bed to make sure there isn’t any coming.”
I nodded. The thing was, we hadn’t exactly bought her the most expensive telescope. It was a bottom-of-the-line item. It wasn’t just that you didn’t want to