Coasters. Gerald Duff

followed the path his body told him to take, and felt sweat begin to trickle down his back as he walked the last two blocks to Thomas Jefferson High.

      Waylon had to try four of the glass doors at the top of the steps leading up to the entrance before he found one unlocked, and it seemed half-jammed. When he got inside, he stopped to let his eyes adjust to the relatively dim foyer and looked around to remember which way he should take to get to the principal’s office.

      “Are you adolescent counseling?” a voice said to his right. It came from a woman sitting behind a small table piled high with papers and stick-on name tags. She had a lot of hair and a lifted ballpoint pen, and she was gesturing with it toward a specific location on the table.

      “Oh, no,” Waylon told her. “I’m just looking for the office.”

      It was to the left, he remembered, but as he proceeded down the hallway, none of the rooms he passed seemed to be the right one, and it wasn’t until he reached nearly to the end of the building that he decided it had to be in the other direction. The woman behind the table watched him come back again with a sidelong look, he noticed, and as he came into hearing range Waylon told her he had gone the wrong way, but she kept her head down and didn’t answer.

      Two people were behind the counter talking as he stepped into the office labeled Administration, but neither looked up until he had stood with his chest jammed up to the barrier between them for nearly a minute. Waylon finally coughed, said excuse me, and the male of the two swung his head around toward the counter.

      “I’m looking to apply for substitute teaching,” Waylon said. “Is there somebody I can talk to?”

      “English?” the man said. He was wearing a blue shirt with a floral print and loose khaki pants. His eyes were set wide apart, and the man was blinking them more rapidly than Waylon would have thought normal.

      “Social studies, more likely,” the woman said, still not looking out from the sanctuary of the area behind the counter.

      “Well, no,” Waylon said. “Math. Algebra, trig, general arithmetic. Not pre-calculus. Not that.”

      “Huh,” the woman said, glancing his way for a couple of beats and then looking back at the flower-shirted man to finish her comment. “Not many of that kind around.”

      “Texas certified?” the man asked.

      “Used to be,” Waylon said. “Temporary, I mean.”

      “We could maybe get a six-month waiver of certification,” the woman said to the man beside her. “If he qualifies.”

      “Recent employer,” the flower-shirt said.

      “Yes,” Waylon said.

      “Huh?”

      “There was one,” Waylon said. “A recent employer.”

      “Who?”

      “British Petroleum, the Beaumont plant.”

      “Reason for leaving?” the woman said.

      “Career change,” Waylon said carefully, remembering the line from some newspaper column he’d once read in the business section. “To pursue other opportunities,” he added.

      The woman walked over to the counter and opened a drawer Waylon couldn’t see and pulled out some blank forms.

      “Fill this sheet out,” she said, pushing a piece of paper across the slick surface of the counter. “Attach any and all official transcripts of college level credit attempted and achieved, and return with a cover letter describing your philosophy of education in an urban public secondary school setting.” She said all this in one breath and was not winded by the effort.

      Waylon picked up the sheet and looked at it, not focussing on a single word. “Will you need references?” he asked.

      “Just do what it says,” the woman said, pointing with all five fingers toward the sheet in Waylon’s hand. “Any appropriate questions you may have are answered on that.”

      “It sounds like you might have said that before,” Waylon said. “It’s a real pleasure to be back in the principal’s office at TJHS again. Thanks a bunch.”

      Neither of the two across the counter responded, except that the flower-shirted man increased the blink rate of his eyes a fraction.

      Waylon started for the frosted glass door and then stopped with his hand on the knob. “Either one of you the principal?” he said.

      “Good God, no,” the woman said and looked up astonished at the man beside her as though he had been the one who had asked the question.

      As Waylon left the building, the woman with the great amount of hair sitting behind the table waiting for adolescent counselors kept her gaze firmly fixed on the stack of name tags before her.

      “Bye,” Waylon told her. “I hope you find that counselor you’re looking for.” That wasn’t the least bit funny, he said to himself. I don’t know why I even tried.

      The woman still didn’t look up.

4

      “My boy’s back home,” Charlie McPhee said to Hazel Boles, watching her watch herself in the mirror of the dressing table as she poked at her hair with a brush.

      “A visit?” she said, lifting the end of the last word she uttered more than was needed for it to be a question and enunciating each syllable like the chime of a silver bell.

      “Say that again, Hazel,” Charlie said.

      “What? A visit?” she said, looking at him through the mirror and thinning her lips into a line as she reached for a tube of lipstick on the table.

      “You said it,” Charlie answered and adjusted the pillow between his head and the back of the bed. “I love the way you say what you say.”

      “Well, is it a visit?” said Hazel, ignoring the compliment in order to study her mouth in the mirror. “They’re the worse. These little cracks. I’d rather be sightless than to have to see them.”

      “More than a visit,” Charlie said. “Waylon’ll probably be with me again until he finds another job.”

      “Jobless is he? Was he laid off?”

      “Fired, really,” Charlie said, sitting up in bed to be able to explain better. “But they didn’t call it that, BP didn’t. Downsizing is the word I believe he told me. Or maybe re-engineering, something like that. He said both of those things.”

      “Whatever it’s called, he’s no longer employed, right?”

      “Yeah. They have cut Waylon loose, that’s for sure.”

      “How old is he, this son of yours, Charles?’

      “Let me see,” Charlie said. “He’s two years younger than Beth and two older than Terry. Right at forty-eight or -nine, I reckon, his next birthday.”

      “A little long in the tooth to be out of work, isn’t he?” Hazel had finished filling in her lips and was now staring intently at her forehead. As Charlie watched, she reached for some instrument on the table before her without taking her gaze off the problem area she had spotted.

      “Waylon’s always had a hard time settling down to just the one thing,” Charlie said. “He’s always kind of worked around the edges of stuff. First this thing, then the other. I don’t think this one’s his fault, though.”

      “I think I’ve met the type,” Hazel said, leaning forward to get a closer read on what she was doing with the tiny tool in her right hand. “What’s your son worked at, then?”

      “Taught school some at first. Operated a TV camera for a while. Lots of stuff. Sold encyclopedias.”

      “A