The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

Mr. Hoover was waiting by the gym door. He had stood in the back doorway through the whole of it with his arms crossed.

“Joanne,” he said. “I owe you a better word than the one I gave you Wednesday. Monday morning I’ll be calling Monica in. And the superintendent.”

“All right,” I said.

“I should have gone to that room myself on Tuesday. Two parents told me what happened, and I thought, I’ll get to it. That’s the process I was talking about. It’s just me, putting a thing off.”

I could have said a number of things. I said, “Thank you for telling me.”

I know some readers will want to know whether she got away with it. She did not, though it did not look like much from the outside, and I will tell it in the order it happened.

On Monday Mr. Hoover took the play away from her. Mr. Hartman, a patient man who can calm a cafeteria by lifting one hand, took over the directing. A letter went into her file, and she signed a copy. She wrote to each of the thirty-eight families on her own stationery, by hand, saying what she had done and that she was sorry, and she did not ask any of them to write back. She kept her classroom.

The cast list went up on the Wednesday. Bob Cratchit was N. Weller. Scrooge was Ryker Neddermeyer, to everyone’s surprise, and Brody was the Ghost of Christmas Present, which suited him, because it came with a robe and a lot of lines to say loudly.

Lance Neddermeyer stopped me in the grocery parking lot that week, embarrassed to the roots of his hair. “I asked him,” he said. “Ryker told me he’d laughed because everyone else did. He asked if that made him a bad person. I told him it made him ten.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know what else to say.”

“That was about right,” I said.

On Saturday morning, a little after eight, I was at the sink when I saw a gray Oldsmobile come up our gravel road slowly, the way a person drives who is not sure she will turn in. It stopped at the end of the lane. It sat there with the motor running.

Then Mrs. Lindgren got out and came up the walk alone, with a paper sack in one hand and an envelope in the other.

I met her on the porch, and I did not ask her in. I will not say that was kindness or the opposite. It was just where I stopped.

“I won’t stay,” she said. She had no coat on over her cardigan and she did not seem to notice the cold. “I wanted to say it to you, and only to you, so you know what I know.”

“All right.”

“I told myself I was saving him from a worse night than that one. A boy gets up in front of the town and freezes, and somebody laughs. I thought if I could scare him off the stage, he would be spared.” She looked at the porch boards. “He didn’t ask me to spare him anything. He asked to try. That was his to decide, and it was not mine, and the notebook was not mine. I knew that when I picked it up.”