She doesn’t look surprised to see me. The late-morning sun casts a hazy glow through her office window. It’s peaceful in the way it always is between classes, full of the easy chatter of other professors in the hall, students sitting cross-legged in front of classrooms, heads bent over books. It’s easy—when you’re in the middle of it—to forget all the stuff going on under the surface: the vicious departmental meetings, infighting and backstabbing, petty gossip. Not to mention the adjuncts living in poverty, the underage drinking, sexual assault, hazing, cheating, and lying of the students. As one of my mother’s English colleagues is fond of saying: Hell is empty, all the devils are here.

I sit on the edge of one of the maroon chairs meant for students, and my mother leans over to flip the switch on her electric kettle. The smell of coffee, books, and old carpet is familiar. As a child I used to sit here while my mother worked, my feet hanging above the ground kicking an uneven rhythm against her desk until she looked up and told me to stop. Sometimes, I would kick for hours. It was a kind of game I played to see how long it took her to notice. And often, she wouldn’t. When students knocked timidly on her door, I would dive under her desk to hide, and she would pretend I wasn’t there. I always thought I had the students fooled, until inevitably they would stand, thank my mother, and yell “Bye, Marlitt” on their way out.

“Truman passed you over again,” my mother says, her critical gray eyes flicking between me and her computer screen.

I nod.

“And now you don’t know what to do with yourself.” Her look is sympathetic, and I’m so grateful she doesn’t trivialize my disappointment that my breath catches in my chest.

I sigh. This—the desire to work—at least, she can understand.

My mother’s waiting for me to say something, peering at me through her black-framed glasses. She does the same thing to her students. I guess she thinks that if she’s patient enough, one of them will come up with something brilliant. We stare at each other—me with the resolute stubbornness of an only child; her with the professorial certainty that I’ll talk eventually, and whatever I say later will be better than if she pushes me now.

But then, somewhere, beyond the warm, paned glass and her potted plants, there it is. The aberration in the otherwise normal day.