Life After Life by Jill McCorkle Page A

the rock jutted out just like a man’s profile, and it, too, is no longer there.”
    “He lost face,” Toby says, and claps her hands; honestly, she has the loudest laugh Sadie has ever heard, could nearly wake those over there in Whispering Pines. “I read about that. Face fell right off the cliff.”
    “Oh, and hang the closed sign on the door,” Sadie tells the girl. This is the right thing for now, keep her busy and they can have a little heart to heart talk when it is just the two of them. The cloakroom was always a good place to have a little talk in confidence, sweaters and jackets falling to either side and muffling the words so others couldn’t hear. She once bought a cross-stitch sampler with a quote the real Mama from Little Women liked to say: HOPE AND KEEP BUSY and that was good advice. In fact, she bought it on the same trip when she herself saw the Old Man of the Mountain. The children were little and Horace was alive. She is thinking that she’d like to go back, she’d like to take her mother there, and perhaps if she can go back to that place, with her mother present, she might be able to explain what she was feeling there. Hope and Keep Busy! It was not an easy time and she has not wanted to look at it.
    “And then can we talk?” Abby whispers. She looks like she’s been crying.
    “Sure, honey.” She watches Abby walk away, each foot in a tile like hopscotch. They will solve this problem and if she has to place a call to the parents she will. She has done this before when it was clear a child needed more than he or she was getting at home. Sometimes she made the principal aware, but other times she did not and just handled it herself.
    “How ’bout this?” Toby is squatted up on the footstool and looks every bit like a little gargoyle. She screws up her brow like she’s concentrating and raises her arm where she says Sadie can draw in the little crop with a Sharpie. “Giddyap.”
    “Perfect,” Sadie says, and the camera whirrs and out pops Toby squatting on the stool. “This is going to take a while if you need to go do anything.”
    “I always have plenty to do,” Toby says. “Yessir, I am one busy woman.”
    “Don’t you ever get tired of this shit?” Stanley had asked her. “Don’t you ever want something for yourself?”
    How odd what that made her remember. Once, years ago, she went into Fowler’s Grocery. It got torn down a long time ago and Food Lion has been there ever since. Fowler’s had those old dark green linoleum floor tiles and poles with clamps they used to reach things way up on the top shelves. The back area, where the butcher worked, was exposed with a sloping concrete floor covered in sawdust, the smell of which she always associated with Fowler’s, and there was Grover Fowler whom she had known since childhood—tired butcher with bloody hands and a good kind heart. One kind exchange and the shared memory of how they stood side by side in their fourth-grade chapel program made her heart beat faster and something in it all made him flush a deep red and lean down closer to the work he was doing. He was a sweet boy from a hard, rough home, but there on the stage his hair was slicked back and he wore a nice dress shirt and together they sang “You Are My Sunshine” and got a standing ovation from the school. Sadie told this; she didn’t mean to. But there was Toby wide-eyed and listening and Abby was there and Rachel, too.
    “Sadie had an affair in the grocery store,” Toby announced, and Sadie said she did no such thing ever in her entire life.
    “We did not do anything,” she said. “He was a good boy with a sweet wife who also was in my class.”
    “Lusting in your heart,” Toby said, and Rachel added that Jimmy Carter would be proud of her. “You never had to worry about Horace catting around, did you?” Toby asked. The question surprised Sadie, though it shouldn’t by now. If Toby thinks something, she says it.
    “I have never allowed myself