Six weeks later, I’m finally in Albuquerque. I found the ad within an hour, convinced my mom it was a good idea within a day, but could not convince her to let me use the car. The problem with being the third of nine children in a house with two cars and two working parents is that nobody really knows when you’re going to get a chance to drive. The irony that this was delaying my possible acquisition of a job which would basically entail driving at least 40 hours a week is not lost on me.
There was a phone interview. Most of the important questions were handled there, according to my stepfather. I wasn’t asked to provide references, which is good, because I have all of one such person, and he probably won’t notice that I quit the gas station unless Deirdre or Jose or someone spray-paints it on the front window.
I’m sitting in a fairly comfortable chair in the front room of Gillan’s Mortuary Services, which is apparently the headquarters of a chain of funeral homes that’s been around since the Wild West. I’d guess business was better back then, because who ever heard of a chain of funeral homes now? Anyway, they have a receptionist whose name I’ve forgotten and whose ethnicity I can’t figure out. She told me to sit and wait and has since been doing her nails.
A woman in a bun and glasses opens the door to the rest of the building, glances at the receptionist without saying anything, then turns to me with something that looks like it tried to be a smile and gave up halfway. “Christina?” I nod and stand as smoothly as I can manage. “Come with me, please?”
I follow her down the hallway, which is so narrow that my stepfather might get stuck in it, past two doors and into a large open room scattered with cubicles. You always see them on TV in massive blocks, so it’s weird to see them like this, seemingly haphazardly placed throughout the room. Several people glance up at me, then back down to their work. The woman, whose black hair is clearly graying from this close up, leads me to one such cubicle at the far end of the room and gestures for me to take a seat.
“So you’re here about a job. What was it?” She picks up her mug of coffee, twirls a wooden stirrer sitting in the cup, and replaces it without drinking anything. I can’t help but be slightly put off by this.
“I… I’m here for the courier position. I had a phone interview…” I’m not sure what else to say. If she knows who I am, shouldn’t she know why I’m here? Is this a test?
“Yes, that was me you spoke to. I’m Letty White, HR… not Betty White, please don’t call me that… I was sick, so you might not have recognized my voice,” she adds. “Honestly, that you showed up here at all is a good sign. You wouldn’t have been the first applicant to just not come in.”
Now I’m really confused. I feel like I should be alarmed at this, but it’s just one tiny rivulet of suspicion in a torrent of worry. Not to be too obvious, but trying to get a job is stressful.
“We just wanted to make sure you were serious. All right, look over this.” She hands me a thick stack of paperwork. “We’ll expect a response within twenty-four hours. The job will start immediately if you agree. And please, read the entire contract. We have some interesting benefits.” Another almost-smile. “Do you have any questions now? We can answer them over the phone if you call during business hours.”
“I… think I need to look over this first,” I manage. This isn’t what I was expecting at all. I don’t really have questions- I know how far I’m going to be travelling in general, that I won’t be informed what I’m transporting except that it won’t require me to lift anything heavy, and that the pay is quite a bit more than gas station wages. I asked all that, and much more, over the phone.
“Great. Please do.” She stands and gives that useless gesture people make when they want you to leave without actually saying it. I stand up and glance around the office, taking in the cubicles and their occupants, a plate-glass window with a view of what appears to be an apartment building, and a row of offices along the back wall. The nameplate on the nearest catches my eye; Aaron Gillan, President.
But Letty White is hustling me along now, back to the entrance. The receptionist doesn’t look up as I pass. I suppose that’s it for today, and I can go home and look over this stack of papers, a good fifty pages by my reckoning, before my shift.
***
“Wait wait wait. You get paid to live next door?” My sister Lily, fourth or fifth of nine (Mom mixed her and Amy up at birth, something neither of them is ever going to forgive her for), is helping me go over the documents. It’s been two hours, and I really can’t wrap my mind around parts of this.
“That’s what it looks like.” I let a few pages fall to the table. Panic flashes through my mind as they land on a coffee ring but disappears equally quickly as I remember there’s not an actual contract here. That’ll come tomorrow, according to a paragraph at the bottom of page four. Whoever drew this up was very eccentric and very thorough, according to Mom’s brief glance at it before she went off to work. Mom was a legal assistant once, but that was before I was born so I’m taking her advice with a serving of salt.
“Look at what they offer you before you sign it. I mean, I don’t think we can move your bed.” She’s right. One of the legs is embedded in the floor from the days when it was Hunter’s (first of nine) bed. I really don’t want to think about how he accomplished that.
Lily is the closest of my siblings. People talk about twin bonds, but Amy has always been Mom’s favorite, so Lily used to tell people she was my twin despite the age gap. We’ve been through quite a lot together, and I can tell she isn’t enjoying the idea of me leaving her alone… but who knows. Maybe she’ll be able to move out to Albuquerque and split my company-approved apartment. The younger siblings would certainly appreciate the two extra beds.
As soon as the thought pops into my head, Dylan and Jay, sixth and seventh, come solemnly marching into the kitchen in a pair of green robes stolen by Lily and Amy from a school play maybe half their life ago. Dylan and the three younger than him are half-siblings to Lily and myself, and Dylan just turned thirteen. So I have no idea what he’s doing with those costumes- he uses them for all sorts of things, and as he gets older, they only get weirder.
They stop in the awkward space between the actual cooking area, a protruding cabinet Dad installed, and the kitchen table, waiting for us to inquire what they’re doing. It’s what Dylan and Jay do. I could probably find a photo of them ten years ago in the same positions.
I can’t help but take the bait. “Okay, why are you wearing the Merry Maid costumes this time?”
“We are the Vinz Clortho Liberation Front,” Jay announces. I really hope puberty is kind to Jay in the end; at the moment he sounds like Freddie Mercury crossed with a teakettle. “In the year 1984, an innocent otherworldly being was imprisoned against his will by a group of paranormal exterminators.”
“We know the truth,” Dylan adds. “Free Vinz Clortho! Free Vinz Clortho!” Jay starts repeating him, though it’s obvious they want to be interrupted; it’s too quiet to be a proper chant.
“What is…” Lily’s face screws up in a look of confusion.
“Ghostbusters,” I sigh, realizing I overheard them discussing this a few days ago. “They’re talking about Ghostbusters.”
Lily shrugs. “I still don’t know who Vince Chloro is.”
“Vinz Clortho was wrongly imprisoned-“ Dylan begins, but the phone rings from the living room and they go running off to answer it.
Lily watches them go, shaking her head. “You’re going to leave me here with that? How am I supposed to deal with them without you?”
“Tell them to bother Amy?” I offer. But I really do feel bad about it, and I come around the table and put an arm around her shoulders. “If I take this job, I can drive you into the city. Maybe you could live with me, like you said.”
“That would be nice,” Lily admits, “but it’s a lot of ifs.”
We return to perusing the pages. It’s only a minute or two before our stepfather wanders in. “Morning… er, afternoon, girls. D’you know who the phone was for?”
Ulysses Grant Martin, Grant to his wife and stepchildren, is currently working third shift, so this is his equivalent of five in the morning. I shake my head. “Sorry, Dylan or Jay got it.”
“So they’re probably asking my boss about how many Pokemon he can recite. Great.” Grant stumps off into the living room.
“Ghostbusters today,” Lily calls after him. A few seconds of checking the documents later, she finds another oddity. “Must not alter paint on company car. Must ensure all painting of company car is done by or in the presence of the persons named below.”
“Maybe they’re going to have me drive a hearse,” I ponder aloud. It’s specifically left open as an option about fifteen pages earlier. The ad didn’t say anything about it, though, so I’m hoping it’s not common.
“Maybe.” Lily doesn’t sound like she’s paying attention. “If you live there, you’re not allowed to sublet and they want to approve roommates.”
“Makes sense, if they own the building and they want to make it worthwhile.” I can tell she’s thinking about it. If I could get Lily out of here, it would severely deplete Mom’s finances, since she and I have two of the four incomes in the house at the moment. But it’s not like she can’t make Amy finally find a job…
“They have quiet hours.” Lily manages the corner of a smile. “And here I was thinking we could start our band there.”
Ah, yes. Our band. Lily and I both like to pretend we have some kind of musical talent that is only not manifesting itself because we’re too busy, because we have exactly one Fender Starcaster in the house at the moment, because we got sick and missed the high school talent show. We’ve been talking about starting a band for years, since before Addie (ninth) was born. It doesn’t really seem any less practical now than it did then, but that’s not exactly a high bar.
I forget to respond to Lily, and we both scan the pages aimlessly, half-listening to Grant insisting that he didn’t put corn in the machine that makes rice cakes. His boss is beyond paranoid sometimes, but considering that nobody manages to hold a steady job in this house, I’d guess that boss will only be an issue for another four months tops before Grant suddenly comes home one day with a Wal-Mart uniform or a landscaper’s shirt. I’m by far the most stably employed member of the family, and that’s not exactly by my preference. Obviously.
I think that’s what does it for me- the reminder that I might wind up on the Cibola Circuit, as Mom calls it, if I don’t act soon. That whole class of people who just unhappily drift from job to job around Laguna, and the county in general, with nothing to look forward to except marriage, kids, and then the end of the marriage and the departure of the kids when they become tiresome. I pull the last slip of paper from the pile and begin filling it out.
ns 15.158.61.17da2
