“Okay.”
“Is there anything in your background we should know about?”
I blinked.
“Uh, no, sir, nothing.”
He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. We received a phone call yesterday. Someone, I’m not going to say who, mentioned a felony theft charge. The room tilted. I gripped the armrest of my chair.
“That’s not true. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”
Bill looked at me and I could see it. He wanted to believe me, but he also had a business to run and a phone call sitting in his ear.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Uh, we can’t move forward.”
I drove home in silence. No radio, no crying, just the white lines on Route 30 blurring past. When I pulled into the driveway, my dad was sitting on the porch, newspaper open across his lap. He didn’t look up.
“How was your day, sweetheart?”
I stood there, keys in my hand, staring at the back of his newspaper. He turned a page, slow, casual.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good.”
He folded the paper.
“Your mom made pot roast.”
I sat through dinner. Pot roast, green beans, iced tea. My mom talked about the neighbors new fence. My dad nodded along like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard. And somewhere between the pot roast and the iced tea, a thought started forming. Small, ugly, impossible. Did they know?
I pushed it down. They were my parents. Parents don’t do that. I wouldn’t push it down for long. Over the next six weeks, I applied to three more places. A grocery store in Ridgeway, a warehouse on the county line, a diner in Cooperton that was hiring morning shift. All three called me in for interviews. All three canled within 48 hours. The grocery store said they’d filled the position. The warehouse never called back. But the diner, the diner was different. The owner, a woman named Pat, was honest with me. She leaned across the counter and lowered her voice.
“Honey, someone called here about you.”
My chest tightened.
“What did they say?”
“Said you had a criminal record. A theft and fraud.”
“Was it a woman?”
Pat nodded.
“Said she was a concerned neighbor.”
Concerned neighbor. That night I waited until my parents went to bed. I crept down the hallway to my mom’s sewing room, the one room in the house that was hers alone. I opened the desk drawer, pushed aside the fabric scraps and pin cushions, and there it was, a small blue notebook. I opened it. My mom’s handwriting, careful, neat, the same cursive she used for birthday cards. Down the left column, names: Milfield Hardware, Ridgeway, FreshMart, County Line Logistics, Coopertton Family Diner. Down the right column, red check marks. Every single place I’d applied, checked off one by one.
I stood in that dark room holding the notebook and the floor dropped out from under me. This wasn’t paranoia. This wasn’t coincidence. My mother had a list. She was tracking me. I put the notebook back, closed the drawer, walked to my room. I didn’t sleep that night. And I just lay there staring at the ceiling, turning one question over and over. How do you fight the people who are supposed to protect you?
The next morning, I placed the blue notebook on the kitchen table. My mom was pouring coffee. My dad was buttering toast. The radio was playing some old country station. Everything normal. Everything ordinary.
“Mom,” I said, “Explain this.”
