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of a young man. Furthermore, the startling physical resemblance to himself seemed to bear out Tom’s awful suspicion.
    He stood over the photographs of his family. He touched the frames. His family: Claire, Chelsea, and Robby.
    None of them knew a thing about the night of his bachelor party.
    Oh, please, let this kid not be mine .
    Abruptly he spun and opened his door. “Dora Mae, did you file Kent Arens’s registration card?”
    â€œNot yet, it’s right here.” She picked it up from her deskand handed it to him. He took it back into his office, dropped to his desk chair, and read every word.
    Kent was seventeen, all right: birthdate 3-22-76, exactly nine months after Tom Gardner’s irresponsible act of rebellion against a marriage for which he wasn’t ready.
    Parents’ name: Monica J. Arens; no father listed.
    He searched his dim memory of that night, but it had been so long before and he’d been drinking—a lot—and she’d been nothing more than this girl who showed up at a party delivering pizza. Had either one of them used any birth control? He had no idea if she had. Had he? Probably not, because at that time Claire was already pregnant, so no birth control was necessary. Before that she’d been on birth control pills, but she had forgotten to take them along on a weekend ski trip to Colorado, and like most randy young whelps, they’d thought themselves invulnerable, and that’s when she’d gotten pregnant.
    Irresponsible? Yes, of course, but that entire night of his bachelor party had been irresponsible, from the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, to the porn movies his fraternity brothers had shown, to his indiscriminate sex with some girl he scarcely knew.
    All because he was being rushed into a marriage that had—in the long run—turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
    Sitting in his office holding Kent Arens’s registration card in his hand, Tom sighed and rocked forward in his chair. Could the kid look that much like him and not be his? Given the circumstances, he doubted it. And if he had so easily spotted the resemblance, anybody could: the office staff, Chelsea, Robby . . . Claire.
    The thought of his wife threw him into a tailspin of panic, and he rocketed from his chair, leaving the card behind,instinct driving him straight to her to protect whatever might possibly be in jeopardy.
    â€œI’ll be up in room two-thirty-two,” he told Dora Mae, striding past her desk.
    Like the main office, the long halls leading to the classrooms were a mess, piled with study materials, covered with drop cloths, smelling of paint. From some of the classrooms came the sound of radios, the volume turned low while teachers, dressed in work clothing, put their rooms in order. The audiovisual director came trudging toward Tom, pushing a cart piled with tape recorders, having trouble negotiating the junk-filled hall.
    â€œHi, Tom,” she said.
    â€œHi, Denise.”
    â€œI need to talk to you sometime about the new photography class I’ll be teaching. We’ll have to work out a darkroom schedule between us and the school paper staff.”
    â€œSee me in my office and we’ll set something up.” Already he resented the intrusion of school business and felt a pang of guilt for letting his personal concerns eclipse the importance of the job he was paid to do. But at that moment nothing mattered as much as his relationship with Claire.
    Approaching her room he felt a touch of contained terror, as if his indiscretion of eighteen years ago would somehow show on his face and she might look at him and say, How could you, Tom ? Two women at once ?
    Her room faced south, like his office. A nameplate beside her door read MRS . GARDNER . Though there was no school policy on students using teachers’ first names, she held that the respect inherent in their using the more formal term of address