#qsweek

She has to unwind her fingers from Ken’s body, has to force a smile onto her lips when she hands over the doll. He hugs Ken close once he has her. Hugs her until he can pop his voice back up and get a glimpse of a smile himself.

“Thank you. I want to show Ken the furthest edge of the playground. Okay?” He steps away. “Okay. I won’t cross over. I swear. I do.”

He’s not one of the kids that worries her — not at recess anyway, not physically. But boys like Blue don’t normally get to stay this soft, this hopeful and free. So she waves him off. And when the rest of the teachers gossip about their kids, Reyna keeps her mouth shut. What Blue tells her is none of her business anyway.

(But she wants it to be. Much too much and much too quickly.)

/

When Ralph Angel arrives — all six feet of him with skin like the pavement after it rains, with the same sort of warmth radiating out from him like the soil in the planters the kids just set up — she needs a moment to process. She doesn’t have long, of course, because a teacher is a teacher first and doesn’t get to have more than fleeting fantasies about her kids’ parents. But the fantasies aren’t quite as fleeting as she’d like them to be when it comes to Ralph Angel.

He never speaks too loud, like he’s afraid of how his voice might leap back at him, how the rich timber will pierce his own ears and trap him against himself. Everybody knows the talk about Ralph Angel Bordelon — how he’d gone to jail and his girlfriend turned to drugs and his sisters barely helped at all. Some of the older teachers speak of him fondly, about the boy who’d so wanted to be a farmer, about the only boy in the family and the only one to mess up. But he doesn’t seem messed up; it’s more like he holds himself as tight as everyone’s expectations try to keep him.

But he smiles at her like he knows how cute he is, like he knows how great the picture of him and Blue looks to girls like her. Girls who pretend like it’s enough to just work and foster and grow. Girls who remind themselves that there’s plenty of time to have her own kids and her own life, and that it will all work out on God’s time. Girls who pause with their fingers pressed to the whiteboard and wonder if their kids will get to have a teacher like her, or a dad like him.

Ralph Angel stands at the doorway after Blue’s already taken off down the hall. He watches after his son, but the rest of his body still angles towards her. Ears still perk and eyebrows still lift when she parts her lips around a half formed question.

“Ralph Angel,” she pauses once his name’s out, and a voice that sounds a lot like her mother’s asks if any of this is appropriate at all. She glances after Blue too. Blue who just wants someone to play with, someone to hear him and care for him and remind him that it’s okay if he doesn’t have real friends just yet. But also Blue who doesn’t quite know the difference between a person who’s meant to stay in his life and a person who’s already gone. Blue needs stability. His teacher dating his father wouldn’t give stability. It’d only bring him more questions, more feelings to furrow his brows and worry his teeth over. He already bites his lips so much they bust.

“Yeah?”

Yeah…. Reyna shakes her head, blinks like she’s flustered, blinks like she wants him to know that she’s flustered. “I’m sorry, I was just wondering if you and Blue would be attending the spelling bee in a few weeks. We’ll have a small one in our class, but the big schoolwide bee usually gets a pretty big turn out.” She gets to host this year. She’ll put the sash on the winning kid and hand out the ribbons to the other children who placed high enough. She has a nice dress for nice dates that she doesn’t have time for, and she’ll wear it with her hair done just the right way that she can duck behind it if she wants to hide a flush of her cheeks. If Ralph Angel’s there, she might push the curls back behind her ears; let him see her. Or maybe she should let them fall. Let them serve as a reminder of the distance she needs.

Ralph Angel nods though. “We could pro’bly be there. Blue’s been working real hard on his words. Spells ‘em in his cereal. Keeps letting ‘em all get all soggy.”

She smiles. “He told me at recess. He wants to invent cereal that never gets soggy.”

Ralph Angel smiles then. Broad and bright and proud. “He could do it too. One day. Don’t you think?”

With them believing in him, “I really do.” She forces herself to take a step back into the classroom and put on her most neutral, professional smile. “Have a good day, Ralph Angel.”

And his lips curve back, and his head cocks to the side enough for that vein in his neck to pulse. Not that she looks long. She doesn’t. But it’s there, just like that smirk of his.

“You too, Ms. Valez. You too.” In the distance, Blue calls out. His voice bounces off the walls without judgment, without fear or hesitation. It snaps Ralph Angel back into the moment, back to his role in this situation. He gives a nod before rounding out the doorway and after his son. “I’m coming, Blue!”

/

Once Darla’s back in Blue’s life, Reyna sees her more than she ever saw Ralph Angel. Maybe because Ralph Angel has a whole farm to tend to while Darla works a simpler job. Either way, Darla swoops in with sunken eyes and lips that alternate between busting at the seams and glittering under fresh coats of balm. And there’s always a moment, just before Darla sees Blue, where her eyes stretch into their corners and her whole body tenses like someone’s playing an awful joke on her, and Reyna’s chest contracts sometimes before she can tell it not to. That fear’s the kind of fear you only have when you know the weight of a loss, when you know how easily the person you’re looking for might not be there. That fear tells Reyna all she needs to know about whether or not Darla chose to leave Blue’s life for as long as she did. And that light — that spark that shines so bright at the sight of Blue, the one that lifts Darla’s cheeks and eyes and shoulders and sends a little laugh rolling out of her — that tells Reyna all she needs to know about whether or not Darla wants to stick around this time.

Blue finishes packing his bag up against Reyna’s desk. He says, “I’m gonna show her the card at dinner tonight. Think she’ll like it?”

It’s a card from their Random Acts of Kindness activity, one that each kid got to design for themselves. Blue drew a frame on the inside of the card and wrote out the word beautiful in his scrunched up handwriting in the middle of it. And he’d labeled the frame as a mirror to make sure that Darla would get that he’s calling her beautiful. It’s probably the sweetest card to come out of the whole activity, and he’d even stuck the card inside of a book to make sure his construction paper wouldn’t wrinkle.

Reyna drops her voice to a whisper, and she knows her eyes glow right out to his. “She’s gonna love it. Especially because it came from you. And because it’s true.” She lets her voice come back up, mostly so that Darla wouldn’t assume she’s saying something awful now that Darla’s close enough to start to hear them. “Your mother really is beautiful.”

Darla ducks into her hair a moment, then pushes it back with both hands, and nods her appreciation. There’s still a bit of space between Darla and the desk, which is just about enough for Blue to whip around without knocking into anything. He cheers at the sight of his mom, throws himself at her legs, and she just barely crouches down quick enough to catch him in her arms. She still breathes him in like she doesn’t know how long his scent will last. He still squeezes her until his hands and fingers leave imprints on her arms. One day, Reyna hopes, that fear will fade into just an appreciation for the other. But they have a long way to go. A lot of love and a lot to heal. As a family.

Darla just lifts Blue up instead of letting go. Says, “Say bye to Ms. Valez.”

Blue waves, “Bye Ms. Valez! Oh, and I think you dropped something.” The giggle that follows says she probably didn’t drop anything, but she peaks over the edge of her desk to see what’s there. A little envelope, much like the one he’d made for his mom.

She puts on her show voice. “Oh, I wonder what this is.” But when she bends for it, Blue gasps and shakes his head. Pushes at his mom’s shoulders.

“Let’s go, Mom. Right now. Right now!”

Darla lifts both eyebrows, but she doesn’t argue. She heads for the door, says, “Thank you,” and takes him off into the distance.

Reyna picks up the card and opens it. The inside might not be a mirror, but it’s got a woman in a sash like the spelling bee one, and the sash reads, Best Teacher. Her voice comes out a little airy, but she speaks to keep herself from tearing up any further.

“Mr. Bordelon, you little charmer.” A whole family of charmers, of good people with good intentions and probably a dozen more people like her just watching and waiting from afar. They deserve it though. They really are something.

.

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