Baker

Baker is so excited after their meeting and tour at the Gifft Hill School that he texts Anna from the parking lot.

Found a school for F. They ran assessments, he can start kindergarten now. V. advanced, they said. Happy to have him and he loved it.

“Bye!” Maia calls out. She’s staying at the school to hang out with friends and then someone’s mother is taking them to town.

“Thank you, Maia!” Baker says.

“Thank you, Maia!” Floyd says, waving like a maniac. Then he turns to Baker. “Daddy, how do we know Maia?”

“Oh,” Baker says. Floyd is probably confused because Maia introduced Floyd to the head teacher, Miss Phaedra, as her “sort of nephew,” a phrase that elicited an expression of surprise and suspicion from Miss Phaedra. Apparently, the phrase didn’t get past Floyd either. Baker was glad Maia threw the sort of in there because it could be explained any number of ways; they wouldn’t have to tell Miss Phaedra that Floyd is, in fact, Maia’s actual nephew, the son of Maia’s brother Baker.

Sometimes Baker wishes Floyd weren’t so “advanced.”

“She’s our friend,” Baker says. Not a lie.

“I like her,” Floyd says. “I like the Gifft Hill School. Why are there two Fs?”

“No idea, buddy,” Baker says. He checks that Floyd’s seat belt is fastened, then heads for home.

He doesn’t hear back from Anna until two days later, Wednesday.

K, the text says.

K? Baker thinks. He hadn’t expected a fight, necessarily, or even a debate, but he had anticipated something more than just K. They’re talking about Floyd’s education! Baker was armed with the school brochure and the notes he’d taken in the margins, and he has the website for backup as well as his own impressions, which he’d spent the past two days organizing into a sales pitch. The school is nurturing (but not indulgent), inclusive, tolerant, and forward-thinking. (Anna will love all of this.) The sky is the limit for Floyd! The classes are small and they have an island-as-classroom initiative that gets the kids outside studying nature and history and Caribbean culture.

But…Anna doesn’t care. Anna is relocating to Cleveland, learning the ropes at a new hospital, meeting her colleagues, reviewing protocols, buying furniture, and maybe even getting excited for Louisa to become pregnant.

Baker tries not to feel like he and Floyd have been brushed off, forgotten.

He doesn’t bother telling Anna that he also got good news during the visit to the Gifft Hill School—he’d received a job offer. The upper school, Miss Phaedra said, desperately needed someone to coach basketball and baseball as well as do some administrative work for the athletic department. She mentioned this because Baker was so tall and “fit-seeming” (the “seeming” being key) and she wondered if maybe he had any background in either sport and might want a chance to get involved in the community, seeing as how he was new to the island. It was like she’d read his mind. Baker said that he did indeed have some background in both sports; he’d played basketball and baseball in high school and in college at Northwestern on the intramural level.