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course is still worth it .

CHAPTER FIVE
    Small, stenciled signs lead the Class of 1970 home.
    As if, Jack Stone thinks, we need directions. The classroom buildings are virtually unchanged since they graduated, at least externally. The gym and football stadium are both relatively new, built with boosters’ money, and there are a dozen trailers that already look older than the redbrick structures they supplement. Generally, though, it’s still the same. The elementary, junior high and high schools touch, so that you could go through all 12 grades in an area less than a quarter-mile wide and 200 yards deep. A young scholar might find his parents’ names or initials carved into the wooden desks.
    But Martha Sue Levens Bain has never been one to leave anything to chance. She would have been haunted by the thought of one out-of-town classmate somehow losing his or her way to the reunion.
    In school, she had been a thin, frowning, freckled girl with nails bitten to the quick who cried in 11 th grade when she got her first B. She has loosened up some over the years. Jack has even seen her very close to drunk on a couple of occasions. In her late 40s, though, she seems to be going back to what Milo Wainwright calls her tight-ass mode.
    Jack Stone and Martha Sue Levens were voted most likely to succeed. They should’ve waited until a little later in the year on that one, he thinks. By the time the yearbooks came out, the image of Jack Stone standing there in cap and gown, football in one hand and textbook in the other, looking to the future, was a bad joke.
    He’s helped Martha Sue and the others get things ready, even mowed the grass since no one else is going to do it until the week before classes start. He pounded all those signs, eight of them exactly 100 yards apart, into the rock-hard clay alongside School Road and wondered why Ray, Martha Sue’s husband and a county commissioner, wasn’t donating a little sweat equity.
    He’s driven to the school half an hour early as a favor to Martha Sue. When he walks in the school cafeteria, it still smells of decades of overcooked lima beans and greasy meat despite its impressive physical make-over. Martha Sue walks up to him with some urgency and asks him how he thinks it looks.
    Jack looks at the red and white bunting, the oldies band setting up in the corner, the caterers assembling cold cuts, fruit-and-cheese platters and shrimp, the papier-mâché gladiator standing eight feet high in the corner, and he tells her it looks fine, just grand.
    â€œYou don’t think it smells like a cafeteria?”
    â€œIt is a cafeteria. It smells fine. And it never looked better.”
    She thanks him. He wants to reach out and smooth the vertical frown wrinkle creasing her forehead. He does take a loose wisp of graying hair and push it behind her ear. The frown disappears.
    Thirty years have passed so quickly it makes Jack’s chest hurt. He’d like to make them all young again.
    He sees half his former classmates at least once a year, and a lot of them more often than that. Today, though, he knows that the enormity of time’s little joke will hammer him, and he has a momentary rush of panic. If it weren’t for Jerry Prince, he doubts even the cajoling of Martha Sue Levens Bain could have gotten him here.
    Ray Bain comes over, already sampling the shrimp, and extends his hand.
    â€œHow’s it going?” he says, not bothering to wait for a reply before telling Martha Sue that the band says it isn’t familiar with one of the songs on her must-play list.
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œâ€˜No Time.’” He says with a shrug. “Whichever one that is.”
    â€œShit!” Martha Sue exclaims, causing her husband to jump slightly. The frown wrinkle returns. “They’re supposed to be an oldies band. This is the class of 1970. What did they think we wanted them to play, Sinatra?” She spins on her heel and goes