Heat Wave by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page A

those
men. After a few outings, she’d figured out why they were divorced.
They were pleasant enough, she supposed, but self-centered, nursing
grievances against their former wives, and pushy when it came to
sex.
    She’d made some girlfriends living here, at
least. Leslie Shumway, two doors down, was a nurse at the community
hospital and surprisingly bubbly, considering that she spent her
days poking IV needles into patients and watching them suffer.
Margie Carerra across the way was a bit older than Meredith, but
she had a self-deprecating sense of humor and a lusty cougar
spirit. If Meredith wound up single when she was forty, she could
do worse than to have Margie as a role model.
    If she was forty and single, of course, her
parents would be disconsolate. But then, they were disconsolate
about everything she did: her job, her unmarried state, her living
in New England. “It’s so far away,” her mother would criticize.
“And so cold!”
    “I like snow,” she’d tell her mother. “And I
love teaching.”
    “You could have been a lawyer,” her mother
would argue. “You had the grades. You could have gotten into any
law school you wanted.”
    “Instead, I’m a teacher,” Meredith would
point out, doing her best not to lose her temper. If her parents
were disappointed by the choices she’d made, so be it. They were
good choices, the right choices for her.
    Right now, Meredith wouldn’t have minded
some of that icy snow New England was famous for. But the
thermometer she’d hung outside her kitchen window read eighty-two
degrees, so snow wasn’t likely. The Lobster Shack was not the sort
of place for which you dressed up—most diners there wound up
wearing plastic bibs with cartoons of smiling lobsters emblazoned
on them—so once she’d cranked up her unit’s air conditioning, she
climbed the stairs to her bedroom to take a quick shower and change
into jeans. It was hot enough for shorts, but shorts seemed too
casual for dinner with her lawyer. She didn’t want to expose that
much leg.
    Not that Caleb Solomon had any interest in
her legs, exposed or otherwise. Not that this was anything more
than her chance to thank him for getting rid of that stupid
citation.
    She wondered if he was divorced, if he lived
in a condo a five-minute drive from his ex-wife and children. She
wondered if he would spend their dinner whining to her about what a
harridan his ex-wife was, how much money she’d taken him for, how
difficult she was about letting him see his children. Caleb struck
her as more of a fighter than a whiner. Even if all he cared about
was winning, she’d prefer that to someone who nursed grudges and
resentments.
    Not that she had to like him. If he wanted
to whine while they ate, it was nothing to her. Nothing more than a
meal and a thank-you.
    With a couple of hours to
kill before her dinner with Caleb—just a dinner, not a
dinner date —she
settled at her kitchen table with her students’ The Things They Carried essays. For
the most part, they were well-reasoned and well-written, addressing
the novel’s wrenching view of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who
fought it. She’d drilled her students well in how to organize and
execute an analytical essay. If Stuart and the faculty council had
any questions about whether she deserved tenure, they ought to read
these essays and see how well she’d taught her students to
write.
    Rachel Stafford’s essay was excellent, of
course. Rachel was the kind of student teachers dreamed
about—diligent, disciplined, not afraid to question the status quo
and make her opinions known. She would be heading to Columbia in
the fall, and that fine Ivy League university would be lucky to
have her. Meredith jotted a few notes on Rachel’s paper, a few
lines of praise, and set it aside. The next paper on her stack was
Matt Colson’s.
    Unlike Rachel, Matt wasn’t a teacher’s
dream. He was brilliant and funny, cute and cocky in his
Hawaiian-print shirts and his Colby