Dick DeNutti pulled his opal black CL600 Mercedes into the VIP spot in the school’s parking lot, shot the stick shift into park and heaved himself out of the car with the grace of a brown bear rummaging through garbage cans. I’m sure he wasn’t aware how hard his door hit the car parked next to his. It was audible all the way inside the teacher’s lounge. Peering through the sooty windowpanes, I could see the flecks of paint sheer off the poor schmuck’s Yaris. But I’m sure that Dick DeNutti didn’t realize he marred someone else’s property, or else he would have stopped to put a note in the windshield. I’m sure of it.
The big jerk tugged his black leather jacket up around his neck and pushed open the heavy door to the administration building just as I returned to the foyer, my face partially hidden behind a steaming cup of tea. He stormed across the floor to Mueskes’s office where tight voices rumbling like a small temblor threatened to build into something more explosive. He tossed a phony knock against the open door, as if he, Board president, needed to knock to enter a lesser being’s office. And from the look on his face, Dick DeNutti knew he was breaking up something good. He erected a taught smile that he had probably perfected over the years to mean one thing and one thing only. And that was that whatever you might be going through didn’t mean shit to him. He didn’t want to be kept waiting, or put on hold or, God forbid, held hostage to the marital squabbles of a couple whose place in his life seemed a necessary evil but also a dreadful mistake. He appeared to be a man on the verge of losing control. And I figured that if he didn’t say what he needed to at that very moment that he heard John Thomas and Melanie arguing, he might implode. Or worse, explode. And that could get all kinds of messy. COPYRIGHT: LAURA A. NOVAK, 2011
The big jerk tugged his black leather jacket up around his neck and pushed open the heavy door to the administration building just as I returned to the foyer, my face partially hidden behind a steaming cup of tea. He stormed across the floor to Mueskes’s office where tight voices rumbling like a small temblor threatened to build into something more explosive. He tossed a phony knock against the open door, as if he, Board president, needed to knock to enter a lesser being’s office. And from the look on his face, Dick DeNutti knew he was breaking up something good. He erected a taught smile that he had probably perfected over the years to mean one thing and one thing only. And that was that whatever you might be going through didn’t mean shit to him. He didn’t want to be kept waiting, or put on hold or, God forbid, held hostage to the marital squabbles of a couple whose place in his life seemed a necessary evil but also a dreadful mistake. He appeared to be a man on the verge of losing control. And I figured that if he didn’t say what he needed to at that very moment that he heard John Thomas and Melanie arguing, he might implode. Or worse, explode. And that could get all kinds of messy. COPYRIGHT: LAURA A. NOVAK, 2011
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