It’s my aunt’s first day of school. She is the youngest of five children and all of her siblings have already had this teacher, including my father.
My aunt sits up straight in her chair while the teacher adjusts her horn-rimmed glasses and clears her throat. She holds a yellowed paper with a list of students’ names typed on it.
The teacher reads each name clearly and loudly, until she gets to my aunt’s name. She stops reading abruptly. A range of emotions passes over her face: surprise, horror, suspicion.
“Are you related to Claude Grenier?” the teacher asks. She says my father’s name like she is pronouncing the name of the Antichrist. She glares at my aunt with anger and dread.
“It happened every year,” my aunt tells me a few decades later.
Raccoon Brontosaurus 