A Skeleton in the Family Read Free

job?”
    â€œYou have no idea.” I’d nearly given up on finding a teaching job for the fall—I’d thought I was all set for another year at the previous college, so being let go after writing up lesson plans for the summer session had caught me off guard.
    â€œWhy weren’t you on tenure track, anyway?”
    â€œYou sound like Deborah.”
    â€œSorry.”
    I waved it away. “It was the same old story. They gave me five sections of freshman expository writing each semester, with a textbook I hadn’t worked with before, and I had a hundred essays to grade every week. With no assistant, of course. And even though I got top marks from the students and peer review, all they wanted to know was why I hadn’t published any papers during the two years I was there. Apparently ‘because I had to sleep’ wasn’t considered a legitimate excuse.”
    â€œThat’s insane. I have no brains at all—literally—and I can see that’s insane.”
    â€œThat’s life in academia.” Though I’d networked like crazy, I’d had no luck lining up a new job for the fall and had been filling in the gap by teaching high school students how to improve their SAT scores. Then one of McQuaid’s instructors got an offer from a corporate education center that was lucrative enough to make her leave on short notice. I’d exchanged small talk and business cards with the department chair at a campus function last year, which is why he’d called me.
    Since I was more than ready to leave that subject behind, I said, “Anyway, about Madison—” But, as if she’d heard my voice, I got a text from the fourteen-year-old herself:
On the way
. “Madison will be back in a few minutes. Are you sure . . . ?”
    But Sid was already heading for the stairs. “Come up tomorrow after work. I want to know how it goes.”
    â€œWill do. You know—”
    â€œI think she’s here!”
    He zipped up the stairs, and I zipped toward the door, but there was no Madison to be seen. He’d fooled me.
    Time was when I could see right through Sid, metaphorically as well as physically, but somehow my best friend was hiding something.

4
    T he next day felt all too familiar.
    I spent the first part of the morning getting Madison enrolled at Pennycross High School. The school was technically my alma mater, but they’d abandoned the century-old building where I’d attended classes some years back. So instead of nostalgia, I got déjà vu—the new building could have been half the schools Madison had attended. On the plus side, we knew everything we needed to know about the red tape involved in the transfer of paperwork and enrolling in classes. In fact, we knew the procedure better than the school’s vice principal, who was looking a bit dazed by the time Madison gave me a big hug and kiss good-bye. Well, actually she waved, and said, “Later!” but for a teenager, that was a display of affection to be treasured and posted about on Facebook.
    Thanks to our efficiency, it was still early when I got to the McQuaid campus, which was considerably more recognizable to me than the high school. Unlike me, my parents had both been granted tenure early on in their careers, which meant that they’d been teaching at the same college since I was in junior high school.
    They’d been trying to get me a job there for years, but the timing had never worked out—either I had what I thought would be a long-term position when something opened up at McQuaid, or McQuaid had just hired somebody when I was looking for work, or one of my parents had been serving in some capacity in which the hiring of their own daughter would be suspect.
    I hadn’t been overly disturbed by the situation because I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to teach in the same department where my parents were regarded as twin pinnacles of