Spanish Blossoms

The message was from Terrance.They wanted to hire her. Wow, she jumped up flailing her fist, a big grin dominating her face. Wow.

Not for the 5-6, but for a kindergarten class. Umm, kindergarten? She stared at the machine, mouth agape. There had been some strange questions. She had made it clear she was not a kindergarten sort of person, even saying they were cute but boring. She listened again. Her vow to take the first job offered wavered. Tiny little people with runny noses, busy hands and limited cognitive ability.

She had been a pre-school teacher before and had grown tired of counting to five. Forword then Backward, Backward then Forword. 12345-54321. Her volunteer work and student teaching were in 4^th, 5^th and ESL. The one kindergarten teaching experience had been required. You had to have one K-2 experience to complete student teaching. The teacher she had worked with had said she should be a kindergarten teacher because she treated them as people, students, not as dolls or toys. Leslie had said she had no interest in teaching kindergarten. The teacher had remarked how sad that was, restating how good she was with them. They continued to get along and enjoyed each others company despite this difference. It had been great to learn from her. Leslie had done calendar and other things. Counting to ten, her cooperating teacher had said that later they would go to one-hundred. The kids had been great, they always were, but the content had been dismally simple. She sank back down into the hollow of the couch.

Choices. Subsist here or provide her two children with the things other middle class children had. Hope for a different job or teach five-year-olds how to count to ten.

            Twenty minutes later she still sat there, looking at the dark water spots on the ceiling. Stinging tears burned the corners of her eyes where they would not fall. There was no way she could take such a job. She had to take it. She drew conditions in her mind.

As she talked to the principal of Terrance Elementary she was informed it was an all day full time, not part time, position. All the students were monolingual Spanish. She agreed to take the job, her first day would be in twenty-four days. A Friday. The students would arrive in twenty-nine, a Wednesday.

***

            "What were you thinking, why didn't you say no." Lavinia's tight voice was raised in accusation, "I don't want to go, I don't want to leave my friends, you don't understand. I'll have no friends, I hate Terrance." Leslie and Jocelyn continued to watch Lavinia, waiting for the storm to pass.

            "I have taken the job, we will be moving."

Jocelyn watched both of them in indecision.

            "You don't ever consider what we want." Lavinia's voice was calm now, even through her tears. Lavinia swept down the hallway sobbing to the back bedroom she shared with her sister. She might have slammed the door if the door could have closed so efficiently. Hearing the squeak bump-bump of the bunkbed as Lavinia hauled herself up to the top and threw herself down on her bed Leslie laid her head on the back of the couch. Jocelyn followed Lavinia soon afterward to comfort her sister leaving Leslie to zone out, laying on the couch staring at the water spots on the ceiling.

***

            By Monday Lavinia was packed off to church camp for a week, leaving Leslie to finish packing up the house with Jocelyn, and look for a new house in Terrance. On Tuesday the car crested the pass leaving the moderate temperatures of the coast behind. The heat intensified. By the time they reached Terrance, both of them were sweltering.

            "There's Terrance." Leslie said. She watched from the corner of her eye as Jocelyn craned her neck to see over the embankment on their right. Turning into town onto the one lane main street they passed a motel, a restaurant and a laundromat on their right and trailers on their left. Behind each of these were houses.

            "Is it always this hot?" Jocelyn turned her wet red face toward her mom, "Where are the people? Is this like a ghost town?"

            Most of Main was under construction and though City Hall was just off main they had to take back-street detours most of the way. At the first detour, they passed a block of faded motel rooms behind a lacework of cracked cement walkways and brown crisp lawn patches. They spotted their first residences of Terrance. A group of four scruffy looking Hispanic kids. The two girls, looking to be about ten, were pulling a small girl in a wobbly wagon while a boy, not much younger than the girls, followed. He pulled whiningly at the back of the wagon as it tottered over the buckled sidewalk along the road. They exchanged stares as they drove past. Looking up Leslie saw big houses with empty green well cared for lawns around the apartment complex. They saw at least four to six abandoned or empty buildings amongst the legitimate business community before finding City Hall from the directions on a scrap of paper Leslie carried.

A local officer took her back to be fingerprinted for her new job.

"I was expecting you." He swabbed her finger with an alcohol patch.

"Expecting me?"

"