Sunland: A Novel

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• • 16 • • Our financial tightrope was getting wobbly and there wasn’t much room for maneuvering. So I’d laid an application on the local school district. I was up early, shaved, fingernails clipped, socked-up, considering whether or not to wear, in this strangulating heat, my grandpa’s long-sleeve blue oxford. It had been one of my grandfather’s nicest. My first interview in over a year, and I was actually looking forward to the event. I hadn’t had a proper job in so long that the meager academic accomplishments on my résumé—twelve years and three institutions to earn an undergraduate degree—struck me as belonging to another person. Outside, the midmorning sun cut through the haze, burrowing through the dusty obscuration and brightening the dullest surfaces. Even the hairs on my arms, as I started the car and backed out, felt tinged. I drove to the local community college—a large, friendly, urban campus—and the office, when I found it, was nothing more than a double-wide trailer in the rear lot. A steel air-con unit hung off the building like a metallic growth. I’d been informed that District Admin had been temporarily relocated. I checked my watch. I was early. So I waited in the heat and left my mother another voice mail. I had questions about the casita, and when I hung up I made a home on a bench, watching summer school students roam between buildings. It happened several months after my father’s suicide, when I was eight, when the environment at home was already confusing and charged. The event was a hiccup, I was sure, in my mother’s life, so I found it weird that I would now file this particular memo under important. Oh, but oh those excruciating minutes of waiting in the classroom with Mrs. Candelaria—I remembered both of us watching a round white clock on the wall as big as the moon, both of us listening for the clip of my mother’s heels to come hurrying down the hall. But they never came. And me, my shame leaking from my face and into Mrs. Candelaria’s, into a room deadened into silence while hurt and disappointment ran hot and hummed through my veins. Eventually, Nana appeared. From that day on Nana picked up more of the slack, looking after me in ways my mother could not. Two students walked past. They were talking about Charles Darwin. I lifted my arms. Oval sweat stains had formed around my armpits. They were horrible. They were embarrassing. I considered calling to reschedule. Instead I knocked on the aluminum door. Inside, the makeshift office smelled like a mechanic’s garage, as though the computers and printers had been expertly lubricated. My interviewer 3 • • 17 • • was a pretty young lady named Katie-Anne, about a decade younger than me, with eager eyes. She brought to mind an Olympian: good skin, perfect teeth, and dense thatch of hair. Katie-Anne guided me to her cubicle and fell into a well-oiled chair, sitting perfectly upright. Her eyes narrowed when she saw my sweat stains. She motioned with my résumé, telling me to take a seat. “They’ve been giving me your messages,” Katie-Anne said to me. “You’ve been calling the office for the past month. Why do you want to substitute teach so badly?” I tried to laugh. “I’m a teacher. Once I pass the state’s exam I’ll be applying for work through your office.” “Substitute teaching is a different beast,” she said. “You’re considered a floater and, in the eyes of this office, dispensable.” I was taken aback by Katie-Anne’s candor. Katie-Anne asked about my qualifications, even though she already held everything with her Frenchmanicured nails. So I laid down the facts. Seven semesters at Ball State, several more in Albany, finished up at UMass-Amherst, plus two semesters teaching. “I worked with high schoolers,” I told her. “I also have some, not much, really, but some experience with elementary school children. But my subject is high school English. That’s what I taught in Northampton.” I watched her click a keypad. “Well, then, you know how this works. Let’s see.” Her computer monitor filled with schedules. “We have a teacher out this fall because she’s having a baby.” “I’ll take it,” I said. “I haven’t offered.” “According to the advertisement in...