Heat Wave Read Online Free

Mr. Solomon’s
office and from there to the Faulk Street Tavern resumed. Three
strong, beautifully blended women’s voices.
    Just like the strong female voices belting
from the jukebox in the bar, singing “Heat Wave.”
    The citation would be taken care of. Caleb
Solomon was probably overkill—going after a mosquito with a
flame-thrower—but he’d get the matter cleared up before it could
damage her chances of receiving tenure. She would pay him for his
services and this entire incident would be peaceably resolved. She
could put it, and that catchy song about a heat wave out of her
mind.
      No, she couldn’t. Even
as the tender harmonies of the Dixie Chicks filled her car, as the
daylight dimmed and the sky grew rosier as the sun slid westward,
as Meredith cruised into Brogan Heights, the condo development
where she lived, and drove along the winding, weaving, neatly
landscaped road to her modest townhouse, she could not shut the
song out of her mind.
    Nor could she banish thoughts of Caleb
Solomon, with his dark, intense eyes and his chiseled jaw and his
profound certainty that he could solve her problem. And the glint
of something—doubt? panic? fear?—that had flickered across his face
while they’d faced each other across the table, listening to an old
rock-and-roll tune that seemed to be about nothing more than the
weather.
    ***
    By now, Meredith ought to
have known that nothing in life was ever as easy as it seemed.
Shortly after her third-period class, she’d received a text message
from Caleb Solomon with the single word: Done. Between her lunch break and her
ninth-grade composition class, she’d received a text message from
Stuart Kezerian, the school’s principal, that was twice as long as
Mr. Solomon’s message: See me.
    Henry stopped by her
classroom as she was dismissing her senior honors class at the end
of the day. Henry had quickly become her best friend on the faculty
after she’d been hired two years ago. He was from Mississippi, not
Georgia, but he and Meredith shared their Southern heritage. “We’re
two fish out of water here in New England,” Henry often joked.
“Two crawfish out
of water.”
    He also joked that Meredith’s ancestors had
probably owned his ancestors, although she pointed out that her
ancestors in Georgia—who, as far as she knew, hadn’t been slave
owners—could not have owned slaves in Mississippi. But Henry was,
like her, a transplant, someone who’d chosen to settle in New
England and learned to tolerate snowy winters, maniacal drivers,
and iced tea you had to sweeten yourself.
    Having spent twenty years teaching English
at Brogan’s Point High, several of those years as the department
chair, Henry was seasoned and steady. Nothing rattled him. When
Meredith had told him about her disaster at the beach on Sunday,
he’d patted her arm, recommended that she hire Caleb Solomon, and
assured her she had nothing to worry about.
    “I think I have something to worry about
now,” she told him when he ambled into her classroom after the last
of her students had departed. She held her phone toward him so he
could read Stuart’s message on the screen.
    Henry batted his hand through the air, as if
swatting at a gnat. “He probably wants to ask you to flip burgers
at the Senior Day barbecue.”
    “I flipped burgers last year.”
    “Last hired, first to flip burgers,” Henry
reminded her. “Wait ’til you’ve been here a while. Life’ll get a
lot easier then.”
    “I won’t be here a while if
I don’t get tenure,” she muttered, sliding a stack of student
essays on The Things They Carried into her briefcase. She tried to take comfort in
Henry’s easy grin. The overhead lights reflected off his eyeglasses
and his bald scalp, and his leather sneakers were scuffed. He
dressed more casually than she did. But then, he’d been on the
faculty long enough that he no longer had to impress
anyone.
    “Don’t sweat it, girl,” he said. “You’ll get
tenure. The