Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
The message left little reason to believe Nikki Werner still held significance in her dad's life. After four months of the little girl inside her heart crying for her dad to come back, four months of wondering if he could hear those cries, she had received her answer. It was loud, clear, and immortalized on social media.
She reread the text from Hannah. The words had not changed.
Thought you should know.
The picture underneath had not changed either. A screenshot of a post. Their dad in a light gray suit, boutonniere pinned to the lapel, standing next to a white-clad woman neither of his grown daughters had ever met.
She replied to her sister.
It's like he doesn't care.
Did he? About any of them? At all?
Outside her classroom window, a gray-bellied cloud swelled in all directions, inflating like a balloon against the steel-blue morning sky. An unwelcome blemish invading a tranquil sea. It billowed and rolled, blown by the same invisible wind that churned the treetops. The world advanced at a dizzying pace, no thought to the weary or brokenhearted.
Four long months had passed since her dad had packed a bag and walked away from her mom—from all three of them. They were hollowed of everything they thought they knew of him, of family, of love. How much more would they have to unlearn?
Billow and roll.
The classroom door whined on its hinges. Tracy Brown stepped through and thrust two paper coffee cups above her head. "Raise your praise, Miss Werner, it's the last day of school! Woo!" She'd donned those canvas sandals middle-aged women like her loved so much and a "Salvy for Perez-ident" T-shirt. Both spoke to her summer dreams of no dress code and plenty of Kansas City Royals baseball games.
Nikki roused a smile in response, but there was no point hiding anything from Tracy. A high school calculus teacher for seventeen years, Tracy spotted consternation in the younger set the way a hawk spied a mouse.
Predictably, Tracy's expression mellowed. She lowered her arms. "That's not the face a teacher should be making five hours from final bell. What happened? Is it Jacob's mom again about his grade?"
Nikki shook her head then held up her phone.
Tracy padded over. Her mouth dropped as she read. "He got married?"
"Apparently."
"When?"
"According to this post of his new wife, this past Saturday."
"Oh, sister. I'm so sorry." Tracy sank into the chair next to Nikki's desk—the same spot she claimed every Thursday morning before students arrived—for a "Gab and Grace session," as she called it. The life-giving thirty minutes of prayer and mentoring that had sustained Nikki through her first year at Northwood High.
Nikki gave a shrug. "His choice, right?" A throb pressed against the backs of her eyes.
"Doesn't make it right, or easy."
No, it didn't. Nikki chewed her bottom lip and laid her phone facedown.
"Want your latte?" Tracy asked.
"No, I'm not in the mood." Quickly she added, "Hand it over."
With a sideways grin, Tracy slipped the cup into her hand.
The first sip went down smooth, a warm, centering presence reminiscent of those hopeful days of first semester, back when her only prayer request was how to whet her sophomores' appetites for the nation-shaping literature of Faulkner and Ellison and Twain. Back when she was oblivious to her dad's affair.
...
