This is Part Three of a three-part story.
*****
He opened his front door, tossed his keys in the ceramic bowl that sat atop the console table and, laboring past it, collapsed on the couch. He was dog-tired, and his shoulder hurt.
He'd just come from baseball. It was the first day of the spring season, and he'd thrown batting practice for over an hour. He hadn't thrown to live hitters in at least five years. If he'd played baseball at all during that time, he'd probably played catch for 15 minutes or so with one of his young nephews. He definitely hadn't thrown seriously since his senior year of high school.
He'd been a starting pitcher on the varsity, so he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing when he took the makeshift mound that afternoon. Granted throwing batting practice wasn't the same thing as game pitching. He wasn't trying to blaze it by the hitters or fool them with off-speed junk, and instead kept a pretty consistent and measured velocity.
Still, he wasn't a young kid anymore, and not having thrown seriously for five years, he should have stretched a lot more before he started. His tight shoulder was just starting to ache, and he knew that by morning he'd probably be in significant pain.
Practice was held indoors. Even though the first day of spring had come and gone, there was still almost a foot of snow on the ground. It had been an unusually cold and snowy late winter, and until the weather warmed enough to melt the crusty layers, caked like dirty frosting over the school's baseball field and adjoining grounds, the
Missiles
had to hold their practices inside the
Monteboro High
gym using rubber baseballs.
That was his second athletic practice of the day in that same gym, with the two sandwiched around eight hours of work at the newspaper. He hadn't even had time to eat lunch. It was 6:30, and besides being exhausted and sore, he was famished.
He looked around his living and dining rooms, and into the kitchen. He'd become so accustomed to his surroundings that rather than providing a sense of comfort and reassurance, his home's familiarity left him even more depressed. For the last few months, nothing about it changed, and that sameness was a constant reminder of not only his escalating OCD, but a debilitating loneliness from which he never seemed able to escape.
He was the tidiest person he knew, and he kept an absolutely immaculate house. Without anyone else to mess with his regimented lifestyle and well-ordered housekeeping - "a place for everything, and everything in its place" his mother used to say - his home always looked the same. It never ever changed.
The problem was that constancy conjured up painful recollections of Lara and her absence from his life. It was strange, but he missed having to pick up after her! At least, that meant there was something alive and animated about his existence, and someone with whom to share it. Not anymore.
He hadn't seen her or talked to her in over three months, since the night he dropped her off in Winnetka. She didn't return with him to Pennsylvania after Christmas. In fact, she didn't return at all.
He wondered if perhaps it was his fault that he didn't read the signs. There
were
signs. He just didn't see them, or if he saw them, didn't interpret them correctly.
Lara wasn't happy teaching at
New Madrid Elementary School
. That was obvious. With the exception of Juliette, she didn't get along with any of the other teachers, and she hated her principal, Joyce Schroeder. Apparently, the feeling was mutual.
Throughout the fall semester, Mrs. Schroeder conducted a number of informal observations of Lara's classroom. Lara complained that after each one Mrs. Schroeder always had something snide or cutting to say to her - "There's hardly any visual stimulation in your classroom, Ms. Wachter. Do you honestly think that you've created a classroom environment that is motivating your students when they have to spend seven hours every day staring at you?" He and plenty of other people liked staring at Lara, so besides being a fucking asshole thing to say, it didn't make any sense either.
But that was all a mere prelude to the formal process of telling Lara how much she sucked. Mrs. Schroeder's official evaluation began with a pre-observation meeting in the beginning of December, followed by a formal observation held a week and a half before Christmas break. She called Lara in to conduct the post-observation conference on December 18
th
, three days before Ingrid's birthday party.
When Lara came home that day, he was gone. He was at a basketball game against New Madrid and didn't return home until fairly late. Lara didn't tell him what Mrs. Schroeder had to say until the long, painful drive back to the Midwest four days later.
Suffice to say, the evaluation was not a good one. In fact, its last sentence pointedly summarized just how disapproving Mrs. Schroeder was of Lara's teaching: "Unless she can make significant improvements during the Spring Semester, improvements to her classroom environment, instructional strategies, and interpersonal relations with students, parents, and colleagues, I cannot recommend renewing Ms. Wachter's contract for next year."
When she read that, Lara just shut down. Unbeknownst to him, she'd boxed up all of her clothes and possessions that night. By the following Saturday morning when she dropped Ingrid off at the Nagy's house and picked him up to begin the long trek back to Chicago, she'd already submitted her resignation... effective immediately. On the ride home, she made him promise to sell her oil-burning
Chevy
and send her the money.
Those were just more unpleasant topics of conversation he'd had to endure on the 11-hour trip to her parents' house. He drove the entire way. Lara said she was too upset to take the wheel and refused to give him a break to take a nap, despite the fact that he told her he'd only gotten about an hour of sleep the night before. "Whose fault is that?" she'd asked.
When he dropped her off in Winnetka after the long drive, he had to carry six or seven heavy boxes of her clothes and possessions into her parents' garage - the same boxes he'd had to load into the bed of his truck that morning around 7:00. When he was done, he drove to the nearest
Motel 6
, checked in, and fell asleep on the king-sized bed without getting undressed or even bothering to pull back the covers.
The next day he drove the rest of the way home to "celebrate" Christmas with his family in Omaha. It was nice to see them all - his parents, brothers and sisters, as well as nieces and nephews. Still, after what he'd been through over those past couple of days, it wasn't the most festive of holidays.
