Miss Georgia Lee closed her valise with a snap. Standing up from her desk, she gazed around at her empty classroom for the last time. Pictures and maps were down from the walls, except for the two pictures of Presidents George Washington and Woodrow Wilson. The chalkboard was washed clean, erasers had been dusted and put away. The American flag had been folded and put into her desk drawer.
She had been carrying home satchels full of her own personal books all week. A country school couldn’t afford to buy many books and she was determined her young charges would have a wide range of reading materials, so she shared her own.
A lump rose in her throat, but she swallowed it down, brushed a hand over her suddenly misty eyes, and resolutely walked out. Once on the porch, she turned around, locked the door, and dropped the key into her purse. She’d return it to James Stone tomorrow. Not tonight.
Tonight, she wanted to simply trudge the two miles to her small, white frame house, feed Elmira, and fix a cup of hot tea. Then, she’d think about 
this whole retirement thing. Not now. It was too raw, too bewildering for thought, sort of like the time she cut her hand with the butcher knife. Then, she was only concerned with stopping the bleeding and binding it up. She didn’t consider the days ahead when she’d have to be careful of the wound until it healed. Yes, leaving a lifetime of teaching was rather like that. She wouldn’t think of those days, weeks, and years stretching in front of her when she’d have no job to go to.
Once she reached Double Eagle springs, she’d take a shortcut through the woods. It cut a mile off her daily walk to school. But, she’d stay on the wagon road until then.
The road was dappled with shade and patches of sunshine. Wild daisies and Indian paintbrush grew alongside the ditches. She inhaled that heady and elusive scent which she knew only as the breath of springtime.
Lifting her heavy skirts, she walked around proof that a horse had recently passed this way. A horse would be a nice thing to own, but, her teacher’s salary wouldn’t allow that extravagance.
She had almost reached the cut-off through the woods when she heard someone shout behind her.
“Miss Lee! Wait. Wait a minute.”
Surprised, she turned around to see Tommy Marshall running toward her. Tommy was one of the quietest eighth graders in her classroom, a shy loner who never seemed to make many friends with the other children. She always felt a special sympathy for Tommy, an only child living with his pale, timid mother and his father, a man, it was said, given to drinking bouts.
She smiled at Tommy as he reached her and bent over for a second, trying to catch his breath.
“Why, Tommy, is anything wrong? Did you forget something in your desk at school?”
He raised clear blue eyes to meet hers. “No, ma’am. I didn’t forget nothin’—I mean, anything. It’s my dad, Miss Lee. He’s not home and I don’t know where he is.”
She reached out to pat his shoulder. “Maybe he had to go to town and was delayed in returning? What does your mother say?”
“Mom, she—well, she just sits around crying and not knowing what to do. I don’t think he was just delayed. He’s been gone since two nights ago. I just wondered, because you walk this road pretty often, if you happened to see him anywhere?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him at all, Tommy, not since last Christmas, in fact, when he and your mother came to see you in the school play.”
He took a deep breath and looked down at his bare feet. “Well, thank you anyhow. Maybe he’ll be home when I get back.”
“Yes, he probably will,” Georgia agreed. “But, Tommy, let me know if he doesn’t come. I’ll go over and sit with you and your mother. I can, at least, do that much.”
He nodded, a swift smile lighting his face.
She watched as he turned around and jogged back down the road, gazing after him until he went out of sight under a hill.
Georgia switched her valise to her left hand, sighed, and started on. At Double Eagle Springs, she left the dirt road and took a walking trail that wound through the woods and cut some time off her walk home. The path wound past blackberry vines, blossoming now, and sumac bushes. It was quiet here in the woods; the thick moss under her feet furnishing a springy carpet. Quiet and darker than the road. Even the birds were still.
Miss Georgia stopped for a moment, listening. Strange. The stillness seemed ominous, as if someone were watching. She shivered and hurried on.
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