“Oh, right. The Quincy Seaport Club. Pretty high-end. This is my car,” he said when we reached the parking lot. He had a late-model Toyota Prius. “I’m green-conscious,” he added. Under the parking lot lights, I could see him blushing. “Not that I could afford anything much more luxurious anyway.”
“This is fine.”
He opened the back and began putting my bags in. “Did you get everything you wanted?”
“Let’s just say that it’s a start.”
“I bet.”
“How fortuitous that you were here,” I said, recalling how Liam had reacted to my use of the word.
“Well, to be honest, I was worried about you,” he said as we got into his car. He paused and looked straight down at the steering wheel. “I mean, I know how Naomi is, and I thought you might get frustrated with her. So I thought that if I happened by, I could sort of take her place, and you’d have the time you needed to shop. I stayed late at the school correcting papers. I like it when everyone’s gone. Anyway, I thought about the mall and you and . . . just stopped.”
“That’s very thoughtful and, as it turns out, prescient.”
He smiled. “I’ve known Naomi a little longer than you have. Sometimes it’s not all that difficult to predict how some things will turn out.”
We drove out of the parking lot. I asked Jim about his teaching day, and he described some of the problems he was having, not with the students, surprisingly, but with their parents.
“They think because they’re paying for their children to go to the school, they deserve some special treatment. Most of them rationalize every problem I have with their daughters. They turn it around to somehow being my fault or the school’s fault or another student’s fault. You would think I was teaching a classroom of angels.”
“Why did you take a job in a private girls’ school?” I asked. “You must have had some idea what it would be like.”
“I thought it would be worse in the public school system, but I think I made a mistake,” he said.
He had started to ask me about my work when, all of a sudden, just after we had made a turn and he was accelerating, he cried out and swung the car so abruptly to the right that we went onto the sidewalk and slammed head-on into a mailbox. Our airbags exploded in our faces. I had better and faster reflexes than he did and had pulled back quickly enough for the bag not to smack me in the face, but his hit his face so hard it nearly snapped his head off. He groaned and pushed the airbag away. I had already done so with mine.
“Are you all right?” he asked. I saw how banged-up his nose, forehead, and cheeks were. There was a thin line of blood cutting just over his right eyebrow.
“Yes, I’m okay. What happened?”
“Didn’t you see him?”
“See whom?”
“That old man. He was suddenly just there, directly in front of us. I thought for sure I was going to hit him. I can’t imagine how I didn’t.”
I looked back and across the street but saw no old man. Another vehicle pulled up right behind us against the curb, and a man and a woman got out quickly.
“Are you two all right?” the man asked after opening the driver’s-side door. I stepped out of the car. The woman came around quickly.
“You okay? We were right behind you and saw you turn abruptly.”
“I’m okay, but he’s pretty hurt,” I said. “The airbag.”
I kept looking up and down the street, searching for any sign of a pedestrian. “Did you see anyone step in front of us?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, there could have been someone, but I didn’t see anyone. I wasn’t paying that much attention until my husband cried out, ‘Look at that!’ ”
Her husband was on his cell phone. Another vehicle going in the opposite direction pulled to the side, and then another car pulled behind the one at the curb.
“What happened?” the driver of the second car asked the woman.
“He says someone stepped in front of them and he had to turn abruptly to avoid hitting him and lost control. Airbag kept him from getting too badly hurt, but he seems a bit banged up,” she said.
“Yes, don’t move,” her husband said, returning to us. He looked at Jim and saw how much more badly hurt he was. “We’re getting you an ambulance. You probably should have an X-ray of your neck to be sure.”
Jim protested. I knew he was more embarrassed than seriously hurt, but it was better to be certain.