“He's a great guy,” she said about Baxter. “We're both artists, and we both had accidents this year. I guess we have a lot in common.”
“My mother was an artist,” Brad Parker said pleasantly. “She painted as a hobby actually. She was a ballerina, with the Paris ballet. She had a car accident at twenty, and it ended both careers. But she did some wonderful things in spite of that.”
“What did she do?” Annie asked politely. It was amazing how many lives were destroyed or lost with car accidents. She had met several in the school, some of them artists like her. With eight hundred people in the school, there were countless stories and people from all walks of life.
“She taught dance. And she was very good. She met my father when she was thirty, but she taught even after they got married. She was a hard taskmaster,” he laughed. “My father had been blind since birth, and she even taught him how to dance. She always wanted to start a school like this. I did it for her after she died. We have dance classes here too. Both ballroom and ballet. You should try it sometime, you might like it.”
“Not if you can't see,” Annie said bluntly.
“The people who take the class seem to like it,” he said, undaunted, as he noticed that she touched the wet seat of her jeans. She was soaked from her fall, and wondering if she should go home. “You know, we have a closet with spare clothes in it for times like this. Do you know where it is?” She shook her head. “I'll show you. You're going to be miserable in those wet jeans all day,” he said kindly. He had a gentle, easygoing voice, and sounded as though he had a sense of humor. There was always laughter just beneath his words. He sounded happy, she decided, and nice. In a fatherly sort of way. She wondered how old he was. She had the feeling he wasn't young, but she couldn't ask.
He took her upstairs to a storeroom with racks of clothes in it. They donated them to some of their scholarship students, or used them for incidents like this. He looked her over and handed her a pair of jeans. “I think these might fit. There's a fitting room in the corner, with a curtain. I'll wait here. There are others if you want.” She tried them on, feeling slightly self-conscious, and they were big but dry. She came out looking slightly like an orphan, and he laughed. “May I roll them up for you? You're going to fall again if you don't.”
“Sure,” she said, still feeling self-conscious. He did, and they felt fine. “Thank you. You're right. My jeans are really wet. I was thinking about going home to change at lunchtime.”
“You'd have caught cold by then,” he said, and she laughed.
“You sound like my sister. She's always worried that I'm going to hurt myself, fall down, get sick. She acts like a mom.”
“That's not an entirely bad thing. We all need one at times. I still miss mine, and she's been gone for almost twenty years.”
Annie spoke softly when she answered, “I lost mine in July.”
“I'm sorry,” he said, and sounded genuine. “That's very hard.”
“Yes, it was,” she said honestly. And Christmas was going to be rough this year. She was grateful they had gotten through Thanksgiving. But they were all dreading Christmas without their mother. They had talked about it when they divided up her clothes.
“I lost both my parents at once,” he said, as he walked her out of the storeroom and toward her classroom. “In a plane crash. It makes you grow up very quickly when there is no one between you and the great beyond.”
“I never thought about it that way,” she said pensively. “But maybe you're right. And I still have my dad.” They had reached her classroom then. She had braille that morning, and kitchen skills that afternoon. They were supposed to make meat loaf, which she hated, but Baxter was in the same class and they always had fun clowning around. She could make perfect cupcakes now, and chicken. She had cooked both at home, to critical acclaim. “Thank you for the jeans. I'll bring them back tomorrow.”
“Anytime,” he said pleasantly. “Have a good day, Annie.” And then he added, “Play nice in the sandbox,” and she laughed. He had a major advantage over her. He could see what she looked like, and she couldn't see him. But he had a nice voice.
She slipped into her seat in braille class, and Baxter teased her mercilessly. “So now the head of the school is carrying your books for you, eh?”
“Oh, shut up,” she chuckled. “He took me to get dry jeans.”
“Did he help you put them on?”
“Will you stop? No. He rolled them up.” Baxter hooted softly under his breath and continued to razz her about it all morning.
“I hear he's cute, by the way.”
“I think he's old,” Annie said matter-of-factly. Brad Parker hadn't been hitting on her. He was just being helpful, and acting like a head of school. “Besides, I didn't see you helping me get off my ass outside when I fell on the ice.”
“I can't,” Baxter said simply. “I'm blind, you ninny.”
“And don't call me a ninny!” They were like twelve-year-olds. The teacher called them to order, and a little while later, Baxter added, “I think he's thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”
“Who?” She was concentrating on her braille homework, and was furious to discover she had gotten almost half of it wrong. It was harder than she thought.
“Mr. Parker. I think he's thirty-nine.”
“How do you know?” She sounded surprised.
“I know everything. Divorced, no kids.”
“So? What's that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe he has the hots for you. You can't see him. But he can see you. And three people have told me you're gorgeous.”
“They're lying to you. I have three heads and a double chin on each. And no, he was not hitting on me. He was just being nice.”
“There's no such thing as nice between men and women. There's interested and not interested. Maybe he is.”
“It doesn't matter if he is,” Annie said practically. “Thirty-nine is too old. I'm only twenty-six.”
“Yeah, that's true,” Baxter said matter-of-factly. “You're right, he is too old.” And with that, they both went back to work, trying to master braille.
When Annie got home from school that evening, both her older sisters were still out, and so was Candy. And Mrs. Shibata was about to leave. Annie fed the dogs, and started her homework. She was still working on it when Tammy came home at seven. She heaved a sigh as she came through the door, took off her boots, and said she was exhausted when she saw Annie, and asked her how her day was.
“It was fine.” She didn't tell her that she had fallen. She didn't want her to worry, and they got nervous about things like that, and worried that she might hit her head. After brain surgery five months before, that would not be a good thing. But she had only hit her bottom. Sabrina came home half an hour later and asked if anyone had seen Candy. She had called her on her cell phone several times that afternoon, and it went to voice mail every time.
“She must be working,” Tammy said practically, as she started dinner. She wasn't a baby after all, even if they treated her that way, and she had a major career. “Did she tell you what she was doing today?” she asked Annie, who shook her head, and then she remembered. “She was doing some kind of shoot for an ad this afternoon. She said she'd come home this morning and pick up her portfolio and her stuff.” She usually carried a bag full of makeup and other things with her when she worked.
“Did she?” Sabrina asked, and Annie reminded her she'd been at school so she didn't know.
“I'll look,” Sabrina said, and ran up the flight to Candy's room. The portfolio and work bag, a giant Hermès tote in dark red alligator, were still there. She carried Zoe around in it sometimes too. But Zoe had been home all day with the other dogs. It gave Sabrina a strange feeling to see the portfolio and bag in her room. She wondered if she should call Candy's agency to see if she had checked in, but she didn't want to act like a cop. Candy would have been furious if she did, even if her intentions were good, which they were. She just worried about her baby sister.