Almost An Angel Read online

  “The Daddy School,” Dennis was saying. “It’s a program set up by my sister-in-law and her best friend to help men become better fathers. I didn’t know which way was up when I first got custody of the twins. Then Gail—” he angled his head toward the stairs, where his wife had vanished a few minutes ago to fetch Amy “—dared me to take a few classes. She wound up taking some, too. Those Daddy School teachers really know how to cut through the crap and figure out what we need to make the whole father thing work.”

  “Classes?” The idea struck Conor as bizarre. “Like, lectures? And homework?”

  “No homework,” Dennis said with a laugh. “Lots of discussion, guys sharing strategies. Molly—my sister-in-law—runs a preschool, and her friend Allison is a pediatric nurse. They know their stuff when it comes to kids.”

  “Amy isn’t a preschooler.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Molly is an expert. Let’s face it, anyone who can get a toddler to stop whining is a genius.”

  True enough. “How do I sign up for these classes?” Conor asked, even though the thought of squeezing yet another obligation into his calendar made his head throb.

  “Just show up at the Children’s Garden Preschool at ten a.m. on Saturday. Tell Molly you’re my friend.”

  Just show up? That seemed too simple. And then Conor realized it wasn’t so simple. “Finding a babysitter on such short notice…” He sighed.

  “Yeah, that’s a challenge. Most of the Daddy School students have wives or ex-wives or partners to stay home with the kids. But if you can’t find a sitter, you can bring Amy with you. Molly usually has one of the other preschool teachers keeping an eye on any children who come with their dads.”

  Conor wasn’t sure how Amy would feel about spending Saturday morning in a preschool, surrounded by toddler toys and overseen by a teacher who spoke in single-syllable words. She might be illogically fixated on the idea of Santa, but she was a smart girl. She devoured chapter books. She drew beautiful, elaborate pictures. She was as comfortable around computers as her father was.

  Maybe she could sit quietly in a corner of the preschool with a few books, or a sketch pad, or a tablet. She could sketch and read and play computer games while ten feet away, her father tried to learn how to be a better dad. Yeah, right.

  He’d have to find a babysitter. Or else give up on attending the Daddy School. He wondered if Dennis’s sister-in-law taught classes on how to land a babysitter. That was one essential parenting skill he still hadn’t mastered.

  *

  ELIZA TOLD HERSELF she didn’t want the phone call to be from Conor, but she was inordinately pleased when it was. The last time he’d called her, a couple of days ago, he’d told her he had made an appointment for Amy with Rosalyn Hoffman. “I wanted you to know,” he’d said. “It has nothing to do with whether I think you’re a good psychologist or anything. It’s just that Amy knows Dr. Hoffman.”

  “That’s fine,” Eliza had assured him, and she’d meant it. Continuity and consistency were good things for a child who’d lost so much. Eliza certainly hadn’t felt judged or rejected. In fact, a part of her had been relieved that Conor’s decision removed an ethical barrier. If Amy wasn’t Eliza’s patient, Eliza and Conor could become…

  What? Friends? Certainly nothing more than that.

  Yet they’d talked on the phone, as friends, for a good twenty minutes. About his work. About reputable auto mechanics in Arlington; her car would be due for a tune-up in January. About the Adams School’s annual holiday concert. Conor would be there; Amy sang in the school chorus.

  Eliza had warned herself that the main reason for his call had been to inform her that Rosalyn Hoffman would be working with his daughter. He would never have a reason to talk to her again. She had no excuse to be disappointed when the only call she’d gotten the following evening had been from her credit card company, offering her bonus points if she spent a thousand dollars on holiday gifts by the end of the year. She shouldn’t have expected Conor to call. She shouldn’t have wanted it.

  But she did want it. And when she answered her phone that evening and heard his voice, her face broke into a giddy smile.

  “What’s up?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound too eager.

  “I was wondering if you’ve ever heard of something called the Daddy School.”

  “The Daddy School?” She frowned.

  “It’s a program to help guys become better fathers. My friend—well, you might know his kids, since they attend Adams, so I’ll keep his name out of it. Anyway, he told me about the Daddy School. I could use a few lessons. I’ll probably be the worst student in the class. I wonder if they have a remedial program.”

  She heard the humor in his voice and laughed. “You don’t need a remedial program. Where are the classes given?”

  “The Children’s Garden Preschool. Obviously, Amy isn’t a preschooler, but that’s where the class meets.”

  Eliza grabbed a pencil and pad, the top page of which happened to contain her shopping list. Below spinach, coffee filters and anti-frizz conditioner, she jotted Daddy School. When she had a chance, she would research the program. It sounded like something she, as a child psychologist, ought to look into.

  “As far as I know,” he continued, “the Daddy School doesn’t have a prom, but they’ve got a damned good basketball team.”

  She laughed again. “Will Amy attend the classes with you?”

  “No. They’re just for dads. I’m trying to line up a sitter. The class meets Saturday mornings at ten a.m. For some reason, the teenagers I know who babysit like to sleep late on Saturdays. But I’ve got a few prospects who haven’t turned me down yet.”

  “How long is the class?” Eliza asked. “Maybe I could stay with Amy.” Then she clamped her mouth shut. What had made her suggest that? It wasn’t appropriate.

  It wasn’t inappropriate, either. She’d occasionally helped a parent in a pinch back at her old school in Albany. She knew and enjoyed the children, and she’d been willing to assist the occasional parent who had an essential errand and couldn’t line up a sitter. She’d worked with one student whose father had been undergoing treatment for cancer, and she’d often gone to the boy’s house to keep an eye on him after school while his mother took his father for his chemo. She’d never been the sort of school staffer who believed students stopped existing the instant the final bell rang at three o’clock.

  Conor hesitated before saying, “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t ask me,” she pointed out. “I offered.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “I’m free Saturday morning. My credit card company wants me to race right out and spend a lot of money on Christmas presents, but that can wait until the afternoon. How long does the class run?”

  Another pause, and then Conor said, “You’re an angel.”

  No, I’m not, she almost responded. The label “angel” had already been applied to Conor’s late wife, and it was causing enough trouble in that context. Besides, angels were supposed to be damned near perfect, weren’t they?

  Conor’s wife might have approached perfection. Her death would have cemented her reputation. Eliza, however, was alive and very human—flaws and all.

  Having a serious crush on the father of a student certainly qualified as a flaw. And spending time out of school with that student might turn out to be a mistake. But she’d offered and he’d accepted. Her Saturday morning now belonged to the Malones.

  She only wished she didn’t feel quite so elated about it.

  Chapter Four

  CONOR COULD CALCULATE pretty much to the day the last time he’d been inside a preschool: a late-August morning four years ago, when Amy had been five. He’d taken the morning off from work and gone with Sheila to Amy’s “graduation” ceremony, at which Amy had been handed a helium balloon and a diploma featuring a border of gold stars and red hearts, declaring her the recipient of an ABC Degree. The school had been a bedlam of screeching children, spi
lled punch and proud parents snapping photos. At one point during the chaos, he’d turned to Sheila and said, “Let’s have another child.”

  “We’ll see,” she’d hedged, clearly not wild about the idea. She’d wanted more time for herself. More time for her painting and her long-distance cycling. She’d started training in earnest once Amy was in kindergarten, and a year later she’d participated in her first 100-mile bike ride to raise money for diabetes research. He’d appreciated her civic-mindedness—to say nothing of the way all that cycling had toned her body—but he would have rather had a second child.

  After another year, he’d persuaded her. And they’d been trying. They’d had a lot of great sex that year, which made her inability to conceive less than a tragedy, although it had been disappointment. Perhaps they should have started sooner. Perhaps all that biking had lowered her percentage of body fat too much. Perhaps one more try and they would have succeeded…if she hadn’t died.

  The Children’s Garden reminded him of the preschool Amy had attended: an interior of bright colors, shelves stacked with books, toys and art supplies, and teeny-tiny furniture. No screeching children, though. He heard the rumble of men’s voices drifting toward the entry as he stood inside the front door, orienting himself and trying to shake his mental image of Eliza from his mind.

  She’d insisted that he call her Eliza when she’d arrived at his house that morning. She’d been wearing jeans and her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail. Small gold hoops had adorned her ears, and the tip of her nose had been pink from the winter air. “Amy can call me Dr. Powell,” she’d said as Conor had greeted her at the front door. “But today I’m your babysitter. I think you should call me Eliza.”

  Using her first name had seemed so personal. Brushing her shoulders with his hands as he’d helped her off with her coat had seemed even more personal. The scent of her shampoo, the vivid darkness of her eyes, the ease of her smile…

  Daddy School, he firmly reminded himself as he gazed at the row of cubbies lining the entry, each one labeled with a name and equipped with a coat hook and a shelf.

  A dark-haired sprite of a woman emerged from an office near the entry and scrutinized him, her smile measured. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Conor Malone. My friend Dennis Murphy told me about the Daddy School.”

  Her smile relaxed. “Yes—welcome! Dennis mentioned you might be coming.” She gestured down the hall. “Go on in. We’ll be starting in just a few minutes.”

  Conor wandered down the hall, past the cubbies, past a wall display of snowmen composed of cotton balls glued to construction paper, to a vast room broken into small play areas separated by waist-high walls. A group of men were gathered in one of the areas. Some sat on the knee-high tables, some on the floor, and a few managed to perch themselves on tyke-sized chairs. Conor experienced an inexcusable spasm of relief that he didn’t recognize any of them. He wouldn’t want the fathers of Amy’s classmates and friends to know that he needed classes in how to be a dad.

  A couple of the men welcomed him with a nod and a smile. They were probably at the Daddy School because they felt as incompetent and insecure as he did. He smiled and returned the nods, and found a spot to sit on the floor, leaning his back against the half-height wall. No way was he going to fit his six-foot frame onto one of those tot-size chairs.

  The woman who’d greeted him when he’d entered the Children’s Garden Preschool strode down the hall and joined the group. She radiated an odd blend of pep and tranquility, a useful combination for someone who ran a preschool. “Let’s get started,” she said briskly. “I’m Molly Saunders-Russo, and we’ve got a few newcomers today. Class attendance always increases just before the holidays. I wonder why that is.” Her grin implied that she knew damned well why that was.

  One of the men informed her, anyway. “It’s because our kids turn into monsters just before the holidays.”

  “Not mine,” another man said. “It’s the only time of year my two behave well. They’re trying to get on my good side. It’s kind of creepy. Why don’t they behave so well the rest of the year?”

  “Maybe you have to dangle the possibility of presents all year long,” someone else suggested.

  “But that’s bribery,” yet a fourth man said. “Do we really want to program our kids to think that every time they behave well they’ll get rewarded?”

  “Good behavior should be its own reward,” someone else chimed in.

  “In which universe?” the second one shot back. “Not the one I live in.”

  Molly held her hands up to silence the banter. “The holidays bring a ton of baggage with them,” she said. “As George said, we have to deal with the strange way some kids suddenly start engaging in excellent behavior, not for the right reasons but because they want loot. We have to deal with the fact that other children, like Dan’s, get so hyper about the holidays that they turn into monsters. We have to deal with practical questions, like how many presents are too many? How can we keep our kids from eating too many sweets? How do we explain to children who don’t celebrate Christmas that they’re good people, even though they may resent that their friends get trees and presents and they don’t? Or children from families that choose not to exchange material gifts and instead donate to charities or making homemade gifts. Or families where money is tight. How do we maintain a balance that works for us?”

  And how do you tell a nine-year-old that Santa isn’t going to bring her mother back? Conor didn’t voice his question. He wasn’t eager to share his sad story in a gathering of strangers; he didn’t want sympathy. He also didn’t want ridicule about the fact that his daughter, an otherwise intelligent girl who knew the difference between reality and fantasy, insisted on clinging to her belief in Santa. Conor still couldn’t completely blame her for punching that little jerk who’d called her stupid, but he had to admit that by fourth grade, most children understood that Santa wasn’t real.

  The Daddy School, he soon realized, resembled a seminar more than a lecture. Molly didn’t hand down truth from above. Instead, she facilitated a discussion. The fathers talked about establishing boundaries, determining what they considered a good holiday and figuring out how to mesh their hopes for the season with their children’s. They brainstormed tactics. They swapped anecdotes. Every now and then, Molly would mention some obvious truth: “Remember that you are the parent. You’re allowed to say no, even at Christmas.” And: “This is an especially good time of year to teach your kids about charity and generosity. Every traditional holiday at this time of year has an aspect of giving. Take advantage of that.”

  At the end of the class, Conor didn’t have an explicit strategy for navigating Amy through the pain of discovering that she was not going to receive the one thing she wanted most for Christmas. But he felt a little more confident, a little less apprehensive about steering his daughter toward the truth. Maybe next week’s class would offer more concrete guidance. He would definitely be attending the Daddy School again next week—assuming he could line up a babysitter.

  As he strolled out of the preschool building to his car, his tread-soled shoes crunching on the loose gravel of the parking lot, his thoughts veered to the babysitter he’d lined up for today’s class. He couldn’t imagine paying Eliza Powell as he would have paid one of the neighborhood teenagers, but he owed her big-time. She had to let him compensate her, but how? If not with money, what could he offer in exchange? How about dinner at one of Arlington’s more elegant restaurants?

  That would be for him as much as for her. And he wasn’t really ready to go out to dinner with a woman who wasn’t Sheila, was he?

  Maybe he was.

  He drove home, not sure what he expected to find when he got there. He pulled into the driveway next to Eliza’s compact sedan and steeled himself. Partly this was out of habit; when he used to go out for an evening with Sheila, they sometimes came home to find Amy sleeping peacefully in her bed and the babysitter hunched over a laptop, doing her homew
ork, and other times found mayhem awaiting them—toys strewn across the floor, spatters of chocolate milk on the kitchen table, and a sugar-fueled daughter bouncing off the walls way past her bedtime while the sitter was busy texting with her friends.

  He didn’t think there would be mayhem today, but he still needed to be prepared—for the sight of Eliza. For her serenity and her stability and her mind-boggling beauty. If only she looked like Rosalyn Hoffman, his life would be a whole lot simpler.

  Swinging open the front door, he was greeted by a sweet, buttery fragrance and a bouncy, happy daughter. “Hi, Daddy!” Amy grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hall to the kitchen. “Look what we made!”

  The view from the kitchen doorway staggered him. Not because the room was a mess—it wasn’t—or because the table held several sheets of aluminum foil covered with golden cookies in the shapes of stars, snowflakes and fir trees and topped with red and green sprinkles, but because Eliza, who was bent slightly as she pulled a baking sheet covered with more cookies from the oven, looked so absurdly at home in the room. Her hair had unraveled slightly from its ponytail, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hands were encased in the thick, quilted cooking mitts he so rarely used because most of his meal preparation entailed zapping stuff in the microwave.

  “That’s the last batch,” she said, setting the cooking sheet on the stove top, pulling off the mitts, brushing a stray lock of hair back from her forehead and smiling sheepishly at Conor. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?” For a room that had clearly been the site of a lot of activity that morning, the kitchen was surprisingly clean and tidy. And aromatic. Conor never baked. He wondered if it was an activity Amy enjoyed. At the next Daddy School class, maybe he should ask Molly whether fathers ought to bake with their children.