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After an aide escorted her students to the playground, Laurel sat at the round table she used for parental meetings. Sitting across a desk made parents feel they were being lectured to; the round table made them feel like partners in educating their children. Laurel had eleven special-needs children in her program, almost too many, given that she had only limited help from an aide. But Athens Point was a small town, and parents had few options. She hated to turn anyone away. Her kids’ problems ran the gamut from ADD and oppositional/defiant disorder to mental retardation and autism. Handling such a broad spectrum was hard work, but Laurel relished the challenge.
To insure that parental meetings went as smoothly as possible, she kept meticulously organized records during the year, and none was more detailed or better organized than the file on Michael McDavitt. The way to get through this, she thought, is to focus on my second meeting. That way I can keep Starlette at arms’ length-psychologically speaking-until I’m actually facing her across this table.
It was a nice idea, only Laurel couldn’t manage it.
Even when she closed her eyes, she saw the former Te
Da
The problem was his wife.
The only mystery about Starlette McDavitt was why Da
Starlette looked tasty enough, and her looks matched her name. She was a former Miss Knoxville or something, not quite a Miss Te
Da
Da
Laurel set aside Michael McDavitt’s file and forced herself to stop thinking about his father. Her strategy had been to focus on the conference after Starlette, and all she had done was rewind to the begi
She pulled out her file on Carl Mayer, her most serious ADD case, and tried to focus on the words and numbers on the page. Mean, median, stanine…no matter how hard she stared, the data wouldn’t coalesce into anything coherent. And why should it? In less than five minutes, she would be face-to-face with a woman she had willfully betrayed for almost a year. A woman who had never liked her, probably out of anxiety about being judged a bad parent. There was no way to avoid making those kinds of judgments, but Laurel always tried to keep them out of her eyes. The problem was, she didn’t respect Starlette McDavitt. Most of the mothers Laurel worked with bordered on sainthood when it came to dealing with their children; Starlette was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Laurel didn’t think she could have betrayed a woman she respected, although that might just be wishful thinking. As Da