Читать книгу For the Sake of the Children - Cynthia Reese - Страница 11

P ATRICK C ONNOR WAS moving his mouth again, but Dana couldn’t focus on his words because of the humiliation humming through her veins. Fired. She was going to get fired.

She saw his frustration and knew he realized she wasn’t paying the slightest attention. She bit her lip and covered up the action by turning to the two malingerers still lounging in clinic. “Boys, out. You’re okay. I’ll put your visit slips into your teacher’s box, all right?”

They went, grumbling, and Dana recovered some of her composure. She forced a smile at Patrick. “You were saying?”

“Oh. Yeah. Just wanted to be clear that you knew how important getting daily status checks on our asthmatic students was. Nellie prepared weekly reports for me.”

Bureaucracy. Red tape had a way of slithering around you until it nearly strangled you. Dana sighed. “Sure. The principal mentioned it to me, though I think daily checks for every asthmatic student we have are a little much. I was hoping we could scale back to perhaps an as-needed basis.”

Patrick’s eyebrows lowered a fraction of an inch, and his eyes cooled ten degrees. “The board and I would like to be certain our students are okay. It wasn’t that much trouble for our other nurse.”

Way to go, Wilson. She had wowed him with her disorganization, and now she was questioning his first request. She didn’t see the need for the twice daily checks, but she did see the need for food on the table, and that meant keeping her bosses happy. “Of course. You still want morning and afternoon checks, correct? Or can we—”

“Yes. Morning and afternoon checks.”

“For all twenty-four asthmatic students?”

“All twenty-four,” he confirmed crisply.

“And any new ones that pop up.”

“Especially the new ones that pop up.” Patrick inclined his head. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your day. No doubt you’ve got a lot to keep you busy.” He stared at her littered desktop, then started for the door.

She sighed as she surveyed the mess Patrick had found so offensive. No point kicking herself now over what qualities not to show your new boss. Dana swept the whole mess into the upturned lid of the copy box leaving a clean desk—and a pile of paperwork to get through before the day was done.

He was right. She had a lot to keep her busy.

T HE DAY WAS OVER . Finally. The last bell had rung, the buses had pulled out, the halls were eerily quiet—and her copy box was empty. Dana celebrated by stretching her tired body on the exam table in the clinic. The tissue paper crinkled and snapped under her as she wiggled her backside a little lower.

“Comfy yet?” Suze Mitchell, the school vice principal, asked from where she’d collapsed in the plastic chair at Dana’s desk. “I come in here to find out whether you survived your day, and you’re bent on taking a nap.”

“Ha! On this thing? If I were four-foot-nothing, maybe.”

“How tall are you?” Suze asked. “I’d kill to be anything more than armpit high.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Try being five-ten for a while.”

“You’re just five-ten? I would have sworn…”

The petite brunette cast an assessing eye up and down Dana’s pretzeled frame.

“I am five-ten. Okay…in bare feet…if I scrunch. I’m five-eleven-and-a-half with good posture. Which might explain why I’ve had such a tough time with relationships. Men get weirded out when the gal is taller than the guy.”

Suze chuckled derisively. “Men get weirded out about a lot of things. Commitment. Fidelity. Bank accounts. And even when you find the right man, he still has trouble accepting that he needs to come home every once in a while instead of going hunting and fishing all the time.”

“Tell me about it, sister,” Dana agreed.

Dana had known from the instant she’d met Suze on her first tour of the school a month ago that the woman would be a keeper friend.

She couldn’t explain the connection. It wasn’t just the way Suze had jumped in and found her a new place to rent after the house Dana had thought she’d secured had fallen through. It wasn’t even that Suze reminded her of her big sister, Tracy, who was older by four years but shorter by at least that many inches. Dana’s little sister was smaller than Dana was, too.

No, it had to be the snap of mischief in Suze’s dark eyes—a snap you might miss behind the otherwise professional mask. But Dana had spotted it. And that glint had told her she’d found a kindred spirit.

Suze stretched and yawned, her own weariness from the day showing. “So, if I can be nosy, how long have you and your ex been divorced?”

“Three years.” Dana stared up at the ceiling and calculated when Marty had presented the papers to her with a flourish. “No, make that nearly four.”

“But…” Suze hesitated. The silence hung, awkwardly the ticking of the clock bringing to Dana’s mind the morning’s earlier awkward silence between her and Patrick.

“But what?”

“Well, it’s none of my business, but I assumed your ex was the father of your little girl. And she’s, what, three?”

Dana agreed. It was none of Suze’s business. She didn’t tear her gaze from the ceiling tiles. “He is,” she answered cryptically.

“Oh.”

Dana could hear the thrum of vacuum cleaners starting up in the halls. Trash cans rattled as they were emptied room by room, the sound nearing the clinic door.

Suze made a show of groaning. When Dana glanced the vice principal’s way, Suze wiggled toes she’d liberated from pointy high heels.

“It’s getting better, isn’t it? You? The job?”

Dana groaned for real. “I’m as tired as if I’d worked a full-moon shift in the E.R. on New Year’s Eve. I think I seriously underestimated what a school nurse does. I was darn busy, I didn’t even get a chance to pee. And I had at least two kids in here upchucking.”

“Pizza,” Suze said.

“Pizza?”

“Yeah. They served pizza in the lunchroom today, and we always have kids upchucking whenever they serve pizza. It’s some immutable law. You’re lucky it was only two.”

“Cooks can’t figure out what’s going on?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“And what’s with all the neurotic asthma tests?”

Suze cocked her head. “Neurotic asthma tests?”

Dana let her exasperation propel her to a sitting position. “Yeah, the asthma tests I have to do on the kids. Every morning I have to check all twenty-four known asthmatic kids, and every afternoon I have to check them again.”

Her thoughts drifted back over her morning conversation with Patrick Connor. His beloved tests added to an already full day and would put her perpetually behind on her daily mountain of paperwork. “Just doing the checks takes a colossal chunk of time out of my day, and that’s not counting the tallying up I do on Mr. Gorgeous’s Excel spreadsheet.”

“Mr. Gorgeous? Who’s Mr. Gorgeous?”

Dana’s cheeks heated with embarrassment. “Uh, you know. Patrick Connor. The board chairman. The man may be a micromanager and a clean-desk freak, but you have to admit he looks like he’s straight out of a cologne ad.”

Suze bit her lip. “Yeah. He does that, all right. Most of the women around here tend to agree—at least, until they try to date him for more than two dates running.”

“Another commitment-phobe, huh? Figures.” Dana recalled the dates her friends had fixed her up with over the years she’d been single. They’d had terrific nights out—until the guys let her know that her friends had neglected to tell them about her daughter. To discover Patrick was the same way didn’t surprise her.

Suze’s face went blank and she shook her head. “I really shouldn’t comment. But what’s this about asthma tests twice a day?”

“I told you. Twenty-four kids twice a day. If they’ve got asthma on their chart, I’ve got them on my list.”

“I didn’t realize—oh, the lunchroom.” Comprehension eased the furrow between Suze’s eyebrows.

“What does the lunchroom have to do with asthma?”

“We’ve got documented mold in the lunchroom.”

“Huh? That’s why I’m checking twenty-four kids?” Dana tried not to gape.

“Yep. About two years ago the roof on the lunchroom building was replaced. The building’s got a gable roof now, but it used to have an old flat roof, and it leaked so much the lunchroom ladies had to put five-gallon buckets out on rainy days just to catch the drips. Anyway, when the repair people went in to fix the roof, they found mold. They traced it down inside the concrete blocks and under some of the floor tiles.”

“Why is there still mold? Why didn’t they get rid of it?”

Suze gave her an amused smile. “The board members sure wished it had been that simple. They figured all they had to do was get in there with a jug of bleach and a scrub brush. But mold, even when it’s been killed, can still cause trouble if it’s not been properly removed. And it can cost half a million dollars to have professionals do a mold abatement. That’s money the school system doesn’t have.”

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me they left mold—”

“No, well, sort of. They took the do-it-yourself approach. Patrick researched out the yin-yang of how to do it, and one CYA thing he’s apparently still doing is these asthma checks.”

Dana huffed. “Pardon me, but he’s not doing the asthma checks. I am.” Now her irritation at having to do twice-daily checks increased. If the school system wasn’t going to properly abate the mold, then tracking the school system’s most vulnerable population was like holding a hose over a house on fire with no water in the hose.

Suze shrugged. “He’s probably afraid of a lawsuit. The whole thing was all hush-hush. The only reason I know anything about it is that I’m vice principal.”

Dana’s chest tightened. Lawsuits. That was something she knew about only too well. “They haven’t told the parents of the kids?” She hopped off the exam table and started pacing the tight confines of the clinic. “I can’t believe that! The school has a duty to report—” But she cut off her words. Of course she could believe it.

Suze appeared genuinely miserable. “Hey, I’ve said way too much.”

“No, you’ve said just enough. I’m going to talk to him.”

“Who—Patrick?” Suze blanched. “Listen, you should understand—”

She broke off. Dana peered at her. “Understand what?”

“Could you avoid bringing my name up?”

“They wouldn’t fire you for telling me, would they?” Dana gawked at Suze.

“No, no. But Patrick is one stubborn son of a gun, and, well…there’s some history between us.”

“You dated?”

Suze leaned her head against the wall. “No. Not that kind of history. I’d rather not say, okay? I don’t—Patrick’s not a bad guy. He just has…issues.”

Dana glanced at the clock on the wall. Five minutes past the time to pick up Kate. Great. “Well, Patrick Connor is about to have a few more issues—because how he’s proceeding isn’t right.”