Chapter Eleven

Susie was due to come by Hazel's office at 5:00 pm. Nicholas would drop his daughter off, then drive back around the long way to the west across the upper bridge and back through the village to the Lunchbox. Hazel and Susie would walk down from St. Fiacre's through the Cyrus College campus, across the Range, and on the footbridge across Auter Creek where they'd meet Nicholas and the two older girls for dinner . . . if the Lunchbox was open for dinner. If not, they'd come up with a Plan B.

The stacks of structural reports on the Old Main's 1859 timbers, the accreditation review portfolio, all the board memo compilations and complications went back into their folders and into or atop the file drawers across the office. They weren't resolved Friday night, and they could begin Monday morning unresolved as well. This young woman's situation intrigued Hazel, even though she was fairly certain she knew less about social media and the challenges of being a teenager than the girl's father assumed.

Smart phones and online tools were part of her daily life as an academic and administrator, but she didn't use them much for conversation and friendly communication. Truth be told, she didn't think of herself as having all that many friends, period. That was perhaps a natural outgrowth of being in an executive position, where those with whom you have the most in common are always those who have the most they need to get from you, and to whom you most need to be able to say no.

Students, even in such a small and theoretically close knit place as this, didn't try to become friends, and it was easy enough to not even have many conversations with them. That's what was so unusual for her about the encounter at the old Indian Mill on Saturday with the mediation circle, and the morning spent down at the Salvage Yard. She had conversations, where things were shared and said about lives and choices and decisions, and it was uncomfortable to realize how entirely unusual it all was. The last twenty-four hours probably included more direct communication with students than she'd had in her two years here to date.

She'd had friends in college, and none of them had kept in touch. Various career and scholarly tracks all led off in directions divergent enough that there was no point of intersection. Off to one coast or another, working abroad or returning to hometowns for marriage and family.

The worship service, if that was the right phrase for it, didn't quite make sense to Hazel. It wasn't what she was used to, insofar as she still had patterns of remembered religion to which she was used; it didn't really give her a feeling of religious insight or personal ecstasy or cosmic communion . . . but for more than just a few moments there in that warehouse, she felt like it was a family to which she belonged.