Today I asked a colleague who grew up in the vicinity of The Logger if she knows him. It’s a small community, after all, and she seems to know everybody.
We were walking to the cafeteria to pick up our students from lunch when I asked her, and all at once she was no longer walking beside me, but was instead perched on her high (and I mean high) heels and swaying a bit as if she would lose her balance, planted as she was there in the middle of the hall.
“Yes,” she said, covering her mouth. “We dated for five years. We were young, 16-22.”
I quickly assured her that it was just a question out of the blue, and explained the situation. She said that normally he would be true to his word, but she’s heard through the grapevine that he may have “fallen off the wagon. He’s such a redneck [not a derogatory term at my school], and he was always all about seeing how hard he could work, and earning a good name for himself, so I’m surprised at this. Maybe something’s wrong.”
“If his dad knows about it, though, it’ll get done,” she said, and recited to me the man’s parents’ home number.
And then she added, “He’s sort of stalkerish,” she said. “He knows when my husband leaves for work, and at our wedding I had a friend who’s a cop on the lookout in case he showed up. Now his brother’s dating the girl who lives across the street from me, so I think that’s how he keeps tabs.”
So for now I might continue sitting back and waiting to see what will happen next. Might my colleague’s grapevine shiver with its exciting gossip–Has The Logger indeed fallen off the wagon?–and firewood show up at my house?
I’m tempted to bet on it, even without calling his dad.