“History is history,” Denise said. “There’s no minimum age requirement.”
“I gave them examples: The Vietnam War, The Great Depression, the Selma to Montgomery marches, 9/11.”
“So the problem isn’t the timing so much as the choice of event? Not worldly enough?” she said.
She coughed. A drop of urine leaked from her bladder.
“The problem is both. I told them to talk to their grandparents, and if that wasn’t possible, then the oldest
human they could find. I don’t care what Josh’s seventeen-year-old brother thinks about anything—getting his
driver’s license or the abduction of all those Nigerian schoolgirls, for that matter.”
Denise stared at Garrick.
“What?” he said.
Sometimes she experienced a thrill imagining herself saying terrible things to Garrick, like “Maybe we lost
the baby for a reason.”
Instead she said, “Those girls are kids too. You think they don’t have stories worth telling?”
“All I mean is I don’t think Josh’s brother has a story worth telling. Anyway, recent history wasn’t on the
menu,” Garrick said.
Denise tapped at the plaster to check whether it was dry. She pried the plainest of the clam shells first. “Isn’t
that how history is best preserved? By accounts from when the event happened?”
Garrick looked down at the stack of student papers on his lap. He spoke carefully. “That wasn’t the
assignment. The point is this kid wrote about his brother getting a driver’s license for fuck’s sake.”
Denise shrugged. “If I were in your class, I’d write about recent history too. I wouldn’t give a shit what grade
you assigned me.”
Garrick sighed. “Believe me, I know.”
Lesson 2: Explore
Denise passed the plaster seashell molds around to the children.
She said, “These are mold fossils. Can anyone tell me how mold fossils form?”
“When bones or shells get pressed into clay,” one of the children said.