The Parent-Teacher Conference

Ginny gave one last wave to the mother and son as they walked out the door.  Little Jeff Barton's blond curls bounced after him as he took hurried steps, to keep pace with his mother.  The sun was starting to dip in the sky a little, a good sign.  As much as she loved her students, Ginny had a bottle of wine and a lovely dinner idea to go with it.  Now, there was only one more slot left in the day for parent-teacher conferences.  Ginny took a quick look at the schedule, only to freeze up when the name crossed her vision.

“Lyla Brangwyn,” she read aloud.  Lyla was a quiet girl, smart and kind, and definitely not the reason Ginny was suddenly so nervous.  She could feel her fingers crossing on one hand, hoping it'd just be Ms. Brangwyn joining her daughter for the meeting.  Even when she heard the roar of that motorcycle, she held out hope.  She'd heard the stories about Lyla's father from first grade and kindergarten teachers, and even witnessed one profanity-laden incident herself.  Maybe he was just dropping the two of them off, she thought to herself, or maybe all three of them would be attending—

The door to the classroom swung open as if propelled by a hurricane, the knob smashing into the wall.  What stood in the doorway now was a pair of people, obviously father and daughter.  Lyla had inherited her father's wild black hair and blue eyes, but the noise of the man kicking the door open had startled her more than it had Ginny.  He, however, stood there, slowly lowering his leg, seemingly oblivious to just how loud he'd been.  “It's this room, ain't it?” he asked his daughter.

Lyla simply nodded to him, then waved to Ginny.  “Hello, Lyla,” the teacher said.  “How are you today?”

“Good,” the girl replied.  Her voice was tiny and timid, the exact opposite of the confident man now striding through the classroom, bumping into a few of the kids' desks at the front of the room on his way.

As he found a seat for himself, Ginny started a conversation with him as well.  “And you, Miste—uh, Grizz, how are you?”

Grizz shrugged.  Ginny had seen him before, and was glad that her idea to drop some of the formalities had seemed to have taken a little edge off already.  He let his forest green hoodie rest on the back of the chair he sat in as he leaned forward.  “A'ight,” he answered.  “Alyce is sick...been tryin' to take care of her an' do the house stuff.”

Ginny adjusted her glasses a bit, threading some of her red hair out from underneath them.  “I'm sorry to hear that.  Ms. Brangwyn has my condolences.”

Grizz let out a short laugh.  “Good, she'll love to hear it.”  He seemed to gain a little more focus when his daughter climbed up into a chair next to him, a chair Ginny hadn't even noticed the girl fetching.  “So Lyla...what's her deal?”

If nothing else, Ginny was glad for Grizz's focus; it had seemed like so many parents that had been in that day wanted to talk about anything but their child.  “Well,” she began, turning to her notes, “Lyla has shown herself to be exceptionally talented.  She's reading at a fourth-grade level two years early...kids like that tend to stay ahead of the curve, so it's a very good sign for future school years.”  She looked up at the two of them, Lyla swinging her legs in her seat and Grizz fidgeting with a pen.  She couldn't tell if they were listening or not, but she continued.  “She's on target in most of her other subjects too...how's your math, Lyla?”

The girl's head perked up instantly when she heard her name.  “I practiced today, Mrs. Dearborn!” she said, straightening out her orange summer dress.  Looking up at Grizz, she added, “Daddy helped!  He brought cards and candy.”

Ginny's eyebrow raised a little.  The cards were probably flash cards, but this guy, crossing his arms and showing off all the scars on them, with candy?  “Could you answer a problem for me?”  Lyla nodded and pushed herself off her chair, watching patiently as Ginny wrote up a simple multiplication problem.  “Okay, Lyla, what is 2 times 5?”

“10.”  The answer had come before Ginny could even finish turning around, faster than it ever had before.  “Like the gum Daddy bought!”

Ginny turned a questioning gaze to Grizz, who responded by digging two empty wrappers out of his pocket.  “She's crazy for this fruity gum,” he said, “so I kinda went with it.  Really sped up that last worksheet ya gave her.”

“You gave her a hands-on learning aid?” Ginny gasped.  Grizz had averted his gaze to scratch an itch on his scalp, using the pen he'd been holding earlier.  

“Probably?”  Grizz tossed the pen on Ginny's desk, and only when it rolled close to her did she see the writing on it, the phone number of the spa she'd gone to last summer.  She hadn't even noticed he took it.  “That ain't bad, is it?  Seemed like she'd get a handle on this times stuff a little better if it was more than just lines on paper.  Countin' gum that's sittin' there on the table's a bit easier for me, thought it'd be easier for her too.”  

“I like gum,” Lyla added, briefly touching her hair.

Grizz turned to Lyla, squatting down to address her.  Ginny could hear the hole in the left knee of his jeans widen a bit as he got himself on the kid's level.  “Yep!  An' since we been cuttin' your hair so short, that gum ain't touched your hair.”

Lyla smiled at her dad and nodded.  “I like short hair!”

Ginny erased the board, listening to the two of them chatter back and forth.  Both of them surprised her in their own ways, Grizz showing such attention to his daughter's feelings, and Lyla being far more talkative than she ever was in the classroom, a topic she'd wanted to breach before time was up.  “Grizz,” she interrupted, causing the two of them to look up at her, “does Lyla always talk so much at home?”

He shrugged a little as he rose to his feet, pulling his dirty gray t-shirt so that it stuck to his back instead of his front.  “Pretty much,” he said after a moment of thought.  “Though it's usually to squeeze a story out of her bro, ain't it?”  Lyla nodded as the three of them returned to their chairs.  “She don't talk much at school, though, I know.”

At this rate, Ginny was prepared to forget about her notes for this conference.  She wouldn't have expected Alyce to be this totally in tune with her child's development goals, much less Grizz.  “I had a teaching aide in that thought she was getting abused or neglected at h—“

Grizz stood up so fast that the chair he'd been in shot out behind him, careening into a small trash bin in the corner.  “Shut your mouth,” he growled.  “I hear that crap all the time an' I had enough, see?  I do everythin' my kid needs, an' still get treated like scum!  Lyla don't act like I raise her wrong, but y'all sure do.”  Grizz moved to the corner and flipped the chair upright with his feet, giving it a gentle push to slide it back into place.

He began to move toward Lyla, but her eyes were still locked on the corner.  “Daddy, you made a mess!” she scolded him.

“...my bad.”  Ginny watched, a little stunned, as Grizz returned to the corner and heaped the trash back in the bin where it belonged.  There was no way Lyla had meant it to be an exercise that took long enough for Grizz to cool off a little, but that was how it happened to work out.  He let out one last sigh as he landed in his chair.  “So, Lyla, she ain't social, that what we were sayin'?”

“Sometimes she doesn't even respond to an adult,” Ginny clarified.  “And she doesn't have a whole lot of friends.  She likes staying in here more than going out on the playground.”

Grizz shrugged a little.  “So what?”  He reached over to ruffle Lyla's hair a little.  “Kid just likes her stories, ya know?  Sometimes it ain't enough to yell for her when supper's ready...she gets her nose in them books, an' it's like nothin' else exists after that.”

Ginny nodded and wrote down the substance of Grizz's response, using that pen just to make sure he didn't sleight-of-hand it away again.  “So she's like that at home as well...”

“Well, yeah, why wouldn't she be?”  A cloud of confusion blotted out the aggression that had remained on Grizz's face.  “Like, she got bullied a little on that playground last year, but she did a lot of readin' before that, too.  An' before it was readin'...she'd ask me or Alyce or Aaron to tell her a story 'bout one of us.  Like...”  Grizz stopped for a moment, then turned to Lyla, a smirk on his face.  “Hey kid, how'd I meet your mom?”

“You and Mommy ran into each other!” Lyla answered, clapping her hands together for emphasis.  Ginny could tell she meant her statement literally.

Lyla laughed a little while longer as Grizz turned back to Ginny.  “So that's the deal.  Ain't nothin' wrong with that, right?” he said.

Ginny couldn't help but shrug a little, after watching Grizz do it so much.  “Well, 'wrong' isn't the word I would use,” she responded, “but it might not be...typical.”  Ginny practically heard the sentence bounce off of Grizz, as he sat there with a look on his face that told her that he didn't get it.  “You know...neurotypical.”

“Lady, makin' the words bigger ain't gonna help me understand it better.”  Grizz leaned back in his chair, letting out a massive yawn.  “What'cha got to say 'bout Lyla?”

Ginny gave her next words more thought than usual, in no mood to set off Grizz's anger again.  “Well...”  Ginny's eyes flicked to the cheap purple carpet of the classroom, to the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, desperate to find an answer to appease Lyla's father.  “...the way she thinks might be different than most kids.  Not better or worse, just different.”

All through her explanation, Grizz had kept that sleepy look about his face after his yawn.  She had expected her news to get more of a reaction from him.  “Look,” he mumbled, stopping to clear his throat.  Grizz leaned toward Lyla a little as he tried again.  “I didn't go to school.  I didn't have friends my age.  So I dunno how a kid's really supposed to act.”

“You've done this before, haven't you?”

“What, you mean Aaron?  He's adopted.”  Grizz shifted in his chair a little, and Ginny gasped a little as something metallic caught a stray ray of sunshine.  Something in his hand had reflected the light at her, and whatever it was, he'd plunged it into Lyla's hair, brushing her delicately.  “And he's a boy.  I didn't know if girls were any different.  So I've just been doing it her way.”  As he said that, he gave Lyla a gentle shake with his free hand.  “Yeah, she don't talk much, an' she loves her books and stories.  But there ain't no harm in it...it's a library, ya know?  What trouble she gonna get into there?”  He suddenly froze, then quickly pulled the brush from Lyla's hair.  By now, the fact that it was a knife with comb-shaped grooves along the bottom edge barely fazed Ginny.  “Hey, Lyla, what's that thing you asked me at dinner yesterday?  I said ask your teacher...?”

Lyla nodded.  “Mrs. Dearborn, how do you make a library?” she asked, her eyes wide with curiosity.

“Apparently,” Grizz added, “she wants to put the family's stories in it too.”

Ginny leaned back in her seat a little, turning herself around to her notes.  “Well, Lyla, one day, I'm sure you'll have the library of your dreams.”  Reading her notes, she realized Grizz had a point; it was just some social and math skills that Lyla was behind on.  It sounded like she was already getting some help at home, and there were definitely no disciplinary reports to bring to his attention.  Between her good behavior and Grizz's unexpected tact, this was probably the simplest conference she'd had all day.  “Well, I've got this document here...”  Ginny slid a paper across her desk, toward the corner Grizz was sitting near.  “...we can test, you know, how she thinks.  But we'd just like your permission first.”

Grizz turned the paper around in his hands, his eyes skimming the front and back.  “That's a lot of words.  Lemme run it by Alyce, an' Lyla can get it back to you.”

“Of course.”  All of Ginny's other papers went right back into her desk.  “That's all I really had to say today.  Did you have any questions?”  Lyla shook her head, and Grizz just stared blankly.  “Well, okay.  Lyla did make something for the art show, so you could always head to the gym and see that before you go.  Technically, the art show starts tomorrow, but everything's already in place.”

“Think I saw it already, but sure,” Grizz agreed.  “C'mon, Lyla, let's go to the art thing.”  Lyla nodded and pushed herself from her chair, taking Grizz's hand and urging him out of his seat.  “See ya, teach!”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Dearborn,” Lyla said as she led Grizz out of the room.  Ginny only waved at the two of them as they left.  She began packing up quietly, so as to listen in on Lyla and Grizz as they walked down the hall.

“Mommy will be so proud of you.”

“Huh?”

“You didn't swear.”

“Ugh, I know.  Ya think anyone would get angry if I swore now?”

“Mommy would.”

“How about we just not tell her?  I hate comin' to school and havin' to watch my mouth.”

Before Lyla could offer a response, Grizz belted out a single F-bomb that seemed to rattle the windows around him.  From the doorway to her classroom, Ginny could see Lyla had turned her head to face Grizz.  “What?” he said, staring back at his daughter.  “That was one of your first words...you can't give me that look.”