Page 90 of For Your Own Good

The bar where she worked was almost in the middle of nowhere, halfway between the airport and the city. The locals she knew. The others were usually visiting. He had to be the latter.

“So what brings you to town?” she said.

“Conference,” he said. “Education.”

“You’re a teacher?”

He nodded. “I got stuck at a cheap hotel near the airport. That room was driving me crazy.”

She poured him a shot of tequila and placed it in front of him. “You deserve a shot. You have a hard job.”

He smiled. She smiled. He drank the shot. And another.

When he was sufficiently intoxicated, she said, “So tell me what really goes on behind the scenes at school. I feel like teachers have a lot of good gossip.” She never asked where he worked, leaving him free to talk.

He did. The first thing he talked about was God, and the lack of God at his school. He went on and on about how teachers don’t live right and, therefore, set terrible examples for their students.

“Like what do you mean?” Fallon said. As a bartender, she had learned pretending to be dumb was considered a good thing. It was the opposite of everything she believed, and she did it anyway.

He told her about two teachers who were having an affair—a science teacher and a health teacher. She could guess who they were. Those rumors had been around when she was at Belmont.

He also mentioned a teacher who was into pagan rituals. That had to be Louella Mason, the art teacher.

Throughout all of this, Fallon kept feeding him drinks, acting like he was the most interesting person she had ever met. “What’s the worst thing you’ve seen a teacher do, though? Like the very, very worst?” She leaned forward across the bar, waiting for him to look at her cleavage. He did.

“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “But this is really bad.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s this English teacher. He’s nice enough, but pretty uptight.”

Bingo. There was only one male English teacher at Belmont.

“Yeah?” Fallon said. “What did he do?”

“He and his wife have been trying to have a baby. It’s been going on for a while now. Not that he talks about it, but she does. My wife knows his wife, because they used to work together at the hospital.”

Fallon nodded, not sure where this story was going. “So did this guy’s wife get pregnant?”

“No. She never did. She told my wife that Teddy got tested and was sterile. He couldn’t have kids.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.” Frank paused to take a sip of his beer. He went quiet, but not for long. He had come too far not to tell the rest of the story. “The thing is, my wife now works for a private doctor. In the billing department.”

Fallon shrugged. “Okay.”

“This doctor, Tobin, he’s a fertility specialist, but he does other things, too.”

“Other things?”

Frank shifted in his seat and looked around, checking to see if anyone was listening. They weren’t. It was late, the bar was a half hour away from closing, and people were starting to leave.

“I mean, my wife shouldn’t have told me this,” he said. “She could lose her job, but she just couldn’t believe it. See, this teacher had gone to her doctor, only he didn’t get a fertility test.”

“Then why did he go?” Fallon said.

“To get a vasectomy,” he said. “That’s what the bill said. A vasectomy.”