Read Ms. Hempel Chronicles for Free Online

visible, winking brightly: yes, I was an iconoclastic thinker.
    Because one never forgets a compliment. “You looked pos-itively beatific during the exam,” Miss Finch, her tenth-grade English teacher, had told her. “Staring out the window, a secret little smile on your face. I was worried, to tell the truth. But then you turned in the best of the bunch.”
    Thus, beatific—blissful, saintly, serenely happy—was forever and irrevocably hers. She shared the new word with her father; she showed him the grade she had received. Aha, he said, with great vindication. Aha!
    Uncomplimentary words, however, seemed to overshadow the complimentary ones. That wasn’t it, exactly. But whereas an ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom, words of criticism were familiar and unmovable fixtures in the landscape: fire hydrants, chained trash cans, bulky public sculptures. They were useful, though, as landmarks. Remember? she used to say to her father: Mr. Ziegler. White hair. He made us memorize Milton. And when that failed, she would say: Don’t you remember him? He was the one who called me lackadaisical.
    Her mother’s memory was terrible, but her father could always be counted on. In his neat, reliable way, he sorted and shelved all the slights she had endured. Oh yes, he’d say. Mr. Ziegler. Looking back on those conversations, she wondered if perhaps it wasn’t fair to make him revisit the unhappy scene of her high school career. Remembering old criticisms is only fun once they have been proven laughably incorrect. Fractions! the famous mathematician hoots: Mrs. Beasley said 1 was hopeless at fractions!
    When her father died, a year ago that spring, Ms. Hempel had spoken at his memorial service, along with her brother and their much younger sister. Calvin talked about a day they went hiking together in Maine, and Maggie, before she started crying, remembered how he used to read aloud to her every night at bedtime, something she still liked to do with him even though she was ten years old now and capable of reading The Hobbit on her own. Ms. Hempel’s story sounded unsentimental by comparison. She described her father picking her up from play practice, when she was maybe fourteen or fifteen. It was winter, and too cold to wait for the bus. Before parking the car in the garage, he would deposit her at the back door, so that she wouldn’t have to walk through the slush. As she balanced her way up the path, he would flick his headlights on and off. The beams cast shadows across the lawn, making everything seem bigger than it really was: the randy cat, her mother’s beloved gazebo, the fur sprouting from the hood of her parka. At the moment she reached the door, she would turn around and wave at him. She couldn’t see him, because the headlights were too bright, but she could hear him. Click, click. Click, click. Only once she stepped inside would he steer the car back out of the driveway.
    When Ms. Hempel finished speaking, she looked out at her family. They looked back at her expectantly, waiting to hear the end of the story. The last time she stood on this pulpit, many years before, she had received the same anxious look. She was the narrator for the Christmas pageant, and though she had spoken her part clearly and with dramatic flair, she forgot to say her final line: “So the three wise men followed the star of Bethlehem.” A long pause followed, and then the three wise men stumbled out of the sacristy, as if a great force had propelled them.
    For the rest of the pageant, she had to stay inside the pulpit, from where she was supposed to look down on the manger with a mild and interested expression; instead, she watched the other children wolfishly, willing someone else to make a mistake more terrible than her own. No one did. It could have happened to anyone, her mother would tell her, but she knew differently: it could have happened only