The camera showed Marco walking off the field, in a shouting match with the umpire. “Fuck you!” He was yelling. “No, fuck you!” Classy guy, that Marco.
I turned the TV off and went to the bedroom, where Holly was naked and waiting patiently.
In the middle of the night, my phone rang. It was on the nightstand over on Holly’s side of the bed, and she immediately bolted out of her sleep.
“Who is it?” she asked, not fully awake.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “It’s right next to you. Hand it to me.”
She pulled it off the charger, looked at the screen, and said, “Who’s Walt?”
Six Years Earlier
We were told the cancer was inoperable, and the doctors had tried rounds of chemotherapy, but they hadn’t been effective. Six months had been the estimated best-case scenario.
They had given us that diagnosis at the end of March. I was in my second year of teaching, and had debated quitting altogether, but she forced me to finish the year, through May. She didn’t think the kids deserved to have a teacher they loved leave them abruptly, and under such dreadful circumstances.
I fought her about it, but she won. Sort of. She always won.
I missed quite a few days, though, during the final two months of the school year, but everyone at Lakefront had been incredibly gracious and understanding. There were days that had been particularly bad for her, and I would stay by her side. We had plenty of hospital days too, and I was going to make sure I was with her every step of the way.
Robin was amazing through those few months. She had insisted I let her plan out everything for my classes for the remaining two months. When I tried to argue with her, her insistence only grew stronger.
“You’ve got other things to focus on,” she had said. “I only wish I could do more.”
I hadn’t been at Lakefront all that long. When I started there, I wasn’t sure how the older faculty would respond to such a young colleague. I wanted to fit in, especially among the other English teachers, but I was worried they might write me off as some wet idealist. Most of them had left me alone to do my thing, but Robin hadn’t been that way.
From the start, she had taken me under her wing. I know that’s probably the most cliché phrase there is, but that’s exactly how she made me feel—welcomed, safe, loved. Even protected.
There had been one day my first year where I handed the wrong test out to the wrong class. Hands immediately shot up around the room, asking if I meant to give them that particular test. I had heard plenty about classes trying to trick teachers, make them look like idiots. I had seen the movies and TV shows. So, I thought they were trying to pull a fast one on me. I refused to listen to them. I told them to be quiet and finish the test. I threatened them with detention or a trip to the principal’s office if they spoke another word. To their credit, they obeyed and finished a test that wasn’t intended for them over material they had never covered. As they left the classroom that day, they all gave me strange looks. I am sure I had looked proud, because I knew I had been on to them and figured out their little ruse.
Well, needless to say the students had been bothered by it all, and started telling other teachers and students in other classes throughout the rest of the day. Word somehow managed to get to Principal West by the end of the day, and he had come into my classroom after school to talk to me about it. I had set the test papers aside after the class had taken the test and hadn’t bothered looking at them until he asked me to.
I was confident they took the right test and told him so. But, when I pulled out the tests, my heart dropped as I thumbed through them. He was particularly disappointed in me. I hadn’t double-checked; I had refused to listen to the students’ concerns. I had failed. He made sure that I would apologize to the class the next morning, and made me promise him something like that would never happen again.
I left the school that day feeling mortified. My wife tried to comfort me and make me laugh at myself. But that was impossible, knowing that I was already the laughing stock of the teachers and students. I even contemplated calling in sick the next morning. But, my wife wouldn’t let me.
As I walked into class that morning, a large bag of Dum-Dum lollipops were waiting for me on my desk, along with a note.
When I first started teaching, I yelled at a student who was being ignorant and disrespectful. I told him, among other things, that whoever it was that raised him should be thrown back into the zoo with the rest of the animals. I had a temper, you see. The only problem was that the young man was the stepson of the principal, my boss. Suffice it to say, that was not my finest day. If this was your Dum-Dum moment in teaching, I think you’ll be just fine. Laugh at yourself, and you’ll become an even better teacher than you already are. Have a splendid day.