Love All: A Novel Read Free

d’être. He was a long-standing member of Save Our Lake Otsego and the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce; he faithfully attended school-board and town-council meetings; the Seedlings School cosponsored soccer and Little League teams; and Hugh rode on a float in the nearby Fourth of July parade. Today, however, he was keeping a low profile.
    He had been up half the night reading about factors influencing memory acquisition in young children, and for a certain boy, visual reinforcement, in the form of Hugh’s face, had to be avoided. Dressing like a cat burglar, taking a roundabout route to work, hiding in his office, and generally steering clear of Graham Pennington, age five, would be Hugh’s tactical offense against the sharpening of any fragmentary memories in the child’s mind. Two weeks had passed since the hospital-room incident, which would work to Hugh’s advantage: with any luck, Graham had already forgotten that he’d encountered his preschool principal beneath his mother’s spread legs.
    Hugh unlocked the school at six thirty and was relieved to find it exactly the way he’d left it a week ago. Someone had been as careful with the rooms as he was. Lights turned off, play rugs prepped for morning play, the playground raked, and the toys put away. Everything was fresh and ready to go. Mrs. Baxter had even primed the coffeepot in the tiny teachers’ room so that all he had to do now was flip the switch to set the grounds brewing.
    It had been a somber week since Hugh’s mother-in-law had unexpectedly passed, long days filled with funeral and interment plans; cleaning out and listing his in-laws’ house; and installing Bob Cole in their guest room for what looked to be a permanent stay. It was Hugh’s opinion that his father-in-law—eighty-six years old, with congestive heart failure and a walker—belonged in the Thanksgiving Home. Hugh’s wife, however, disagreed. It had been a long-standing plan for Anne’s mother to move to 59 Susquehanna when her father passed, and now Anne argued that they had to extend the same invitation to her dad. Never mind that Joanie, a spry seventy-four-year-old former nurse who baked and cleaned—a welcome addition to any household—had been positively winning in comparison to Bob. Never mind, too, that Anne herself could barely tolerate her father. It was the right thing to do, she’d persisted, and more to the point: What would people think of her if she didn’t?
    At six forty-five, the Seedlings School staff began to arrive. First was Mrs. Baxter, a retired Cooperstown Elementary School secretary who had taken over Seedlings’ administrative work five years back. She drove a light-blue Oldsmobile and had light-blue hair and called all the kids Sonny or Girlie, which sent them into spasms of laughter. Close to seventy, she had ambitiously made the leap from electric typewriter to PC and now pecked out Excel spreadsheets and printed up dot-matrix birthday cards for Hugh and the teachers at the appropriate times of the year.
    “Mr. Obermeyer.” Mrs. Baxter nodded. “Welcome back.”
    “Thank you. Coffee’s perfect.” Hugh raised his mug to her: # 1 DAD! Julia had given it to him for Christmas.
    Mrs. Baxter shrugged off her blazer and hung it in the closet, then removed her brown-bag lunch—always egg salad on wheat with a bag of potato chips and a Sprite—and placed it in their compact refrigerator. “Is this yours?” asked Mrs. Baxter, holding out a half-empty yogurt cup.
    “No,” said Hugh.
    “One of the girls,” said Mrs. Baxter disapprovingly, meaning Cheryl, Melanie, or Priscilla, the teachers at Seedlings. “You should speak to them about not picking up after themselves.”
    “Absolutely,” said Hugh, who was hardly listening.
    “There is one thing I wanted to mention,” said Mrs. Baxter.
    “Great,” said Hugh. “Let’s schedule a sit-down. Maybe before lunch.”
    Mrs. Baxter frowned, started to speak, but Hugh was saved by the arrival of