The events and characters in this fictional story are not based on real persons and its sexual acts are consensual and between adults. The plot revolves around a chance encounter between a retired private school professor and a former student.
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Retirement was expected to be a blessing for Emma and me. A modest one on a teacher's retirement scale, but still moderately tolerable if I continued to do some tutoring on the side for wayward students. For most of my teaching life I had done after school and summer tutoring at the behest of distraught parents. I seemed to be a magnet for failing miscreants and some occasional knuckleheads that parents felt could become doctors or lawyers. Eighty-nine percent of the time the parents were dead wrong. The kids just wanted out from under adult control and to do whatever the hell they wanted in the moment of living without responsibilities. It's too bad for them they didn't have a place in America like A.S. Neil's Summerhill, a private place of learning in England, operating on the basis that students would learn best when they had a desire to do so; not made to do so. The closest choice they had, at least here, was Barrington's Center for Advanced Knowledge, my old stomping grounds.
Once my students eventually 'matured' the percentages became more like fifty/fifty as to becoming responsible adults, though still not doctors or lawyers. That's how life works in case you haven't already figured that out. It is like a mathematical equation: it must balance on both sides of the equals sign. Emma and I were like an equation also. We were both supposed to live in harmony, grow old together, and pass away at the same age; in our sleep, balancing out one another.
But Emma -- well, she broke the equation and left in her sleep the year after I retired. It has been five years, now, and I still miss Emma as though it were yesterday. In my daily walk to the mailbox to check for junk mail, I always looked back toward the screen door and I still hope to see her standing there, today. Expectantly, she would be waiting for me to bring her daily reward of return address stickers to which she contributed her charity donations so faithfully. Out of guilt, partially, I still send the donations with her name as though she still stood at the door waiting for those damned stickers. God only knows what I'm going to do with ten thousand return address stickers, in boxes, stuffed in the corner of the garage.
Standing by the mailbox, shuffling through another stack, I heard a melodious angel-like voice speak my name, "Doctor Von Goethe?" It wasn't Clara's voice, the elderly lady from next door. Her voice was more cracked with age than mine. It was a vibrant, youthful voice and apparently someone who knew me. It was quite an unexpected pleasure in this neighborhood of old-timers.
Turning toward the voice, I saw a young, summer bronzed thing standing there staring at me, trying to decide if she had guessed right. She looked like Daisy Duke having just escaped from the Dukes of Hazard television show; mostly undressed in a skimpy, barely legal, halter top and tattered jean-shorts with the pockets hanging down below the crotch -- right where the pant legs had been 'professionally' worn. The length of the shorts couldn't even begin to cover the curves of her ass and must certainly be cutting off the circulation to her waist and legs. If she'd been a car, she wouldn't even begin to look street legal -- but perhaps she might, if she were standing on a dark, seedy street corner, downtown at 2:00 AM.
"That would be me, miss," I acknowledged with a nod and polite grin. It was the sort of response you would give anyone whom you found wondering your neighborhood that seemed to be lost and dragging a leash behind her. If I'd been about twenty, I'd certainly be bending down to grab hold of that mop top and give her a friendly pat on the ...
Her voice, which had faltered, picked up in the silence, "It's me! Holley. Holley Picket. Ninth grade?"
"Miss Picket?" I mused aloud. Like a rolodex my mind rolled back five years to ninth grade algebra.
"The girl I taught named Miss Picket was short, wore pigtails, and had braces -- so no, you're not Miss Picket -- must be some imposter." I grinned as the images of those days cleared in my mind, "So, did you ever figure out where those two trains coming from opposite directions would pass if train A was traveling at 50 mph and train B was going 75 mph, Miss Holley Picket?"
Her face, bright as the smile on the sun, lit up with the same savviness of five years ago. "No. But I remember you making a mistake on grading my paper, Dr. Von Goethe."
"I did?"
"Yes," she replied, "That question was worth fifteen points. You took off fifteen points, but gave me twenty-five points for the answer I wrote instead, 'I don't think it matters to the people in the trains where they pass each other, just as long as they are on different tracks -- that's all they would be concerned about!' So, you actually gave me more points that the question was worth. That helped me stay on the A-B honor roll that semester. I just needed those extra points to make it. But I think you knew that already."
"Maybe, maybe not Miss Picket."
I answered, thinking back to the day of the last exam for the year and watching her fidget, frown, and chew the eraser head off of her pencil as she struggled with the test. By the end of it, she was a white-knuckle case and on the verge of tears. Miss Picket was a sweet kid, always helpful, and kind to others, but so very immature. People, I felt at the time, should be judged by their deeds, not their grades on a picayune test. So, yes I did fudge the grade for her -- no one died over it and certainly it made her parents happy that she was an A-B student for the year.
"Are you lost?" I asked, as we seemed to be standing, looking at one another with no particular sense of purpose. I was trying not to seem as interested as I was in the voluptuous eighteen-year-old fidgeting as her fingers tried to tug the abbreviated postage stamp-sized cloth down to cover an errant nipple.
"No, sir. Just helping Miss Clara out," she answered, as she reached into Clara's mailbox.
Retrieving her mail, Holley held it close to her bosom, perhaps as a means of shielding that wayward nipple. And then added, "I'm a nursing student this year at Adkins Junior College and visiting Miss Clara! We got our first assignments for home study! I'm supposed to meet three times a week with older folks and learn how to do blood pressure checks and stuff like that, you know, temperature, mental acuity test -- whatever that is."
"I'm sure you will do well, Miss Picket," I nodded as she smiled and pirouetted toward Clara's driveway.
Each delicate cheek of her rear-end seemed to be waving back at me alternately, as one long shapely leg stretched out and passed the other, flexing her glutes. Then, unexpectedly her head swiveled. The spin flared out that long wavey sun-bleached hair; just like in a television commercial. The strands seemed to swirl in slow motion. Our eyes meet as she halted. Caught, I knew that she knew my gaze had followed her up the sidewalk rather than directing itself to my own walkway. Did she realize my focus was on those round-ass orbs of hers? Her lips pursed and then spread again into that bright sunshine smile once more as she spoke.
"I could come over to your house and check your vitals too, Doctor Von Goethe. Maybe, my instructor would give me extra credit. Would that be okay?" Her smile, her lilt, and her posture seemed to have a sense of coyness about it, just short of -- was that a come-on line?
"Sure. That sounds good. See you in about twenty minutes?" The dryness in my mouth did not feel like cotton; it felt like the cotton boll itself! I scurried inside, feeling my heart beat increasing and some anxiety on the rise as well.
Dropping the mail on the kitchen table, I cleaned off some crumbs from lunch that still lingered around and wiped up a spot of mustard by the napkin holder. All in all it is fairly presentable. After five years I still managed a semblance of Emma's neatness syndrome although, at present, it appears in keeping with a widower's abode. Nothing has changed from the way she kept it since -- well since the funeral. Looking up at her portrait on the mantel, I muttered, "I hope you're not reading my mind now, sugar, it would probably be turning your cheeks red as you listen in to my thoughts."
The wall clock had stopped, or so it seemed. I checked the time on the stove against it, but they read the same; perhaps the stove clock stopped also? Then, again, it was probably just my imagination that time was suspended. There -- it moved a minute ahead. Damned clock! Twenty minutes now seemed to be taking an hour's worth of speed to move. If it moved at all - quantum mechanics at work in the universe, no doubt.
The light knock at the door sent me to my feet in an instant and I was there by the time the echo had floated down the sidewalk. "Welcome Miss Holley. Come in," I said as I pushed the screen door open for her to pass. You know, there isn't much room between two people standing in a doorway as one slides past the other. Especially when one of those two has a backpack on and is projecting a couple of ample sized melons hanging out front. She didn't seem to mind that both of them raked across my chest as she slid by me into the foyer. They certainly felt soft, yet firm at the same time.
I motioned to the kitchen as I closed the screen door behind her. Setting down her backpack on the table, she asked, "Do you want me to just take your BP or give you the full treatment, Doctor Von Goethe?"
"Let's go for the works, Miss Holley!" I chucked thinking about what she might be calling the 'full treatment.'
