Showers in Season Read Free

shavings on the bottom of the bag, along with other filthy substances she didn’t want to examine too closely. His lunch was smashed in a sack between his English and history books. He obviously hadn’t changed backpacks or decided not to use it today. Everything he needed was in here.
    Had those adolescent hormones so flooded his brain that he had forgotten to take it? Had he not noticed, when he got on the bus this morning, that he was empty-handed? She sighed, conceding to herself that she was about to enter the twilight zone of teenagehood with him. It was too soon. She didn’t knowif she could survive it with a third child. Rick and Annie had already driven her to the brink of insanity.
    She picked up the backpack, wondering if they made textbooks out of cement these days, since the pack was so heavy that no normal backbone could support it. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to carry it. But it was after lunch by now. Hadn’t he noticed that it was missing? Why hadn’t he called her and asked her to bring it to him?
    She got into her pickup and dropped the backpack on the seat. Maybe all her admonitions to her children that they’d better be in serious physical jeopardy to call her at the clinic had finally gotten through. But it seemed unlikely that he would heed her warnings now. This was the same kid who had called her during his lunchtime last week and asked her to bring him a Snickers bar before fifth period because he needed it to bribe his teacher. She remembered shouting something about how Mrs. Jefferson’s dying cat was more important than a stupid Snickers bar, and that if he’d done his homework he wouldn’t have to worry about bribing teachers. He had slammed the phone down, as if she had done him wrong.
    Now, just a few days later, he was too considerate to call her about his backpack? She didn’t think so.
    She got to the school, parked in front of the door, and flung the backpack over her shoulder. Trudging along like a hiker carrying a VW on her back, she made her way to the office.
    The overworked office worker looked up at her as she came in. “May I help you?”
    “Yeah,” she said, out of breath as she slid the backpack off and dropped it onto the counter. “These things weigh a ton. They ought to put wheels on them or something. Our kids are all going to grow up bent over like ninety-year-old men.” She saw that the lady was in no mood for her humor. “Uh…I need to send this to Mark Flaherty, seventh grade.”
    The woman turned to her computer to look up Mark’s schedule, then lowered her glasses and peered at Cathy over the top of them. “Mark is absent today.”
    “No,” she said, leaning across the counter to look on the screen. “He’s here. He just forgot his backpack.”
    The woman looked at the screen again. “Sorry. He’s been marked absent in every class.”
    Cathy’s mouth fell open. Had he been kidnapped on the way to the bus stop, or had he deliberately cut school? “Would you do me a favor?” she asked. “Would you look up his friends? Andy Whitehill and Tad Norris? Are they here?”
    She typed their names in, then shook her head. “No, I’m afraid they’re absent, too.”
    Her face grew hot. She wondered if smoke was coming out of her ears. Any minute now the top of her head would blow off. “So you’re telling me that my son and those two are playing hookey?”
    “They’re not here,” the woman said, smiling now, as if she finally heard something that amused her.
    “Well, don’t you people call parents when kids don’t show up? I mean, what if he’d been kidnapped or something? They’d have made it to Memphis by now.”
    “You’re supposed to call us,” the woman said. “If your child is going to be out, you’re supposed to call by nine.”
    “But if he’s not supposed to be out, and I don’t call, what then?”
    “Then he’s marked unexcused.”
    “Well, if he’s dead , it doesn’t really matter if it’s unexcused, does it?” she