“Okay then,” Marianne said, a bit hesitantly. She was surprised by their compliance, by how easily they gave up. Then she recognized the conversation. It was the same one actual teachers of actual students had everywhere, from university composition programs to elementary school faculty lounges. Let’s make the best of what we have to work with, the line went. Also: this isn’t my fault, it was going on long before I got here. And finally: if we can’t solve the problems we set out to solve, can’t we at least be relevant? She’d once heard a sixth-grade teacher explain, in exasperation, that fractions had many uses. Drug dealers needed to understand fractions, after all …

“And bonuses,” Lorraine said. “Those are very motivating.”

Marianne turned off the projector. “I guess that ends our meeting.”

She wanted to talk to Eric again, but Tom had already overtaken him. “Did I ever tell you about covering the whole Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal back in the eighties, the women I met at PTL? Their supporters? Their secretaries?” He lowered his voice obscenely. “I mean, I was drowning in it.”

Marianne excused herself, saying she had to speak to the caterers. She walked purposefully across campus to the dining hall, which was never locked. It was empty, as she knew it would be—there was no lunch service because of the field trip, and the caterers weren’t due until late afternoon. The hall’s big windows faced west, so this time of day, late morning, the whole place was church-dim and shadowed, even though outside it was bright and sunny, eighty degrees. Marianne was glad she’d decided to keep the room’s wood paneling and Frances’s kitschy gilt-framed prints of manatees and alligators and herons. Though she’d complained to Eric about living in a motel, there were times when she was filled with the deepest kind of affection for this place, like fondness for the face of a homely child or an ungainly animal.

Near the door, on a collapsible metal table, someone had left the things they must have borrowed for last night’s reading’s refreshments: a white tablecloth, unevenly folded, and cups and bowls they’d washed and stacked. A cut-glass punch bowl and a thin metal ladle. Marianne picked up the lumpy tablecloth and shook it out, then folded it, bringing the corners precisely together, then together again, into a neat square. After their mother died, her father had left all the laundry, especially the sheets and towels, crumpled in baskets near the washer and dryer until he needed them, and when Marianne was home she ironed and folded them, set the linen closet back to rights.