Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

  “No!” She pushed her chair back and stood to face her parents. “Teaching is not a stepping-stone! And, no, Aunt Susan, these kids are not hopeless.”

  “And, Kyle, you want to know what I make?” She held her brother’s gaze for a thick moment. “I make a difference.”

  This was a line from a poem Mrs. Towner had e-mailed her, but hearing herself say it aloud, to her brother of all people, filled her with such a sense of power that she whipped back to face her mother and father again. “For your information, I am going to teach forever. You can throw out the law-school letters.”

  With that, she stormed out of the dining room and down the hall to the dark office that had once been her bedroom. She hadn’t finished her pie, but she didn’t care. A sense of purpose that had been knocked out of her during the fight had finally returned.

  From the dining room, she could hear her mother’s concerned voice, too muffled for Kaytee to make out the words.

  Then her father’s angry roar: “Sometimes you just want to go to a goddamned quiet movie theater!”

  Kaytee logged in to her blog for the first time in weeks. She wasn’t going anywhere. As she wrote, she absentmindedly pressed the area under her eye.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25

  HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS, WAS home to forty thousand people and nine prisons. A fifth of its residents were directly employed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Others guided tours at the prison museum, or sold barbecue, or manned the gas stations where families stocked up on snacks after visiting incarcerated relatives. Anyone else who worked worked at Walmart.

  The Ray family had always lived in housing provided at reduced cost to prison guards. They moved from time to time, but the houses looked the same and always ended up smelling the same: like a combination of Kentucky Fried Chicken, cigarettes lit from the kitchen stove, and several cats that came and went as they pleased. These had been the smells of Coach Ray’s childhood. Not that anyone here called him Coach Ray. Inside the Huntsville town limits, he became Samson Ray Jr., former corrections officer. Son of Samson Ray Sr., current corrections officer. Brother of Dale Ray, corrections officer currently on administrative leave. SJ for short.

  Samson Jr. knew better than to expect a greeting from Dale, who kept his eyes fixed on the TV as if no one had entered the room.

  His father acknowledged him with a curt “Hey.”

  “Brought y’all some shirts.” Samson Jr. handed them the stack of Killer Armadillos gear he’d brought from his apartment.

  “I ain’t wearing this bullshit,” said Dale.

  “They’re for the kids.”

  “My kids got their own shirts from their own school.” Dale tossed the shirts on the couch in a lump, though Samson Jr. expected the kids would end up wearing them anyway. In Dale’s house, the need for clean laundry eventually overrode matters of principle.

  When Samson Jr. and Dale had been in high school, the counselors gave talks each year about the warning signs of hypervigilance. That was the official term for how people acted when their job included a real risk of being doused by urine, or bitten by someone who might have hepatitis C, or attacked by a prisoner who’d been taken off psych meds to save the prison some cash.

  Their father had been a mean drunk, though he’d mellowed out some as he’d gotten older. For Dale, it was a good day if he was only drunk. On top of this, Dale’s mental alarm system was always scanning for signs that Samson Jr., coaching in the Negro league in the city, thought he was better’n everyone back home. Which, truth be told, Samson Jr. did. The one thing football had surely done for him was keep him from becoming Dale.

  It had taken a long time to do anything else.

  Like many of his teammates who’d busted out of their hometowns on athletic scholarships, Samson Jr. had taken the easiest classes in the easiest major, keeping his grades just high enough to play. He was sure he’d go pro at the end of it all. Instead, he’d found himself back in Huntsville, degree hanging limp in his hand, working a prison-guard job he could have gotten right out of high school. It was the future no Huntsville kid ever dreamed of but most of them ended up with.

  And so he gave himself back to Huntsville, piece by piece. He began making late-night visits to a girl named Cici, who’d had a crush on him before he left and saw his return as an act of romantic fate. The fact that Samson Jr. never called her his girlfriend, that he never took her anywhere, that the Ray family had a long tradition of men who resented women for roping them into relationships in the first place: these were details that could be overlooked in the name of destiny. Cici seemed sure they were falling in love and would one day build a happy family surrounded by prison walls.

  “Women will be your downfall,” Samson Sr. warned, three beers into any given night. “Soon’s one of them says she wants to get married, you best run the other way. Otherwise she’ll get pregnant and get you stuck with her.”

  Sure enough, after a year of fielding late-night phone calls and visits, Cici announced she was pregnant.

  “Told ya,” said Samson Sr.

  It had never been the physical violence of prison guarding that bothered Samson Jr. Confrontation kept him from getting bored. Restraining inmates didn’t feel much different from the challenges of football. If anything, it was an outlet for the frustration of being back home.

  It was the stark racial divide of the corrections system that got to him. Samson Jr.’s college years had been a brotherhood of sweat and sacrifice that included many black teammates. Guys from Detroit and North Memphis and the South Side of Chicago all brought the same heart, the same willingness to block for him when necessary. And he recognized in them, on some wordless level, the same tight knot of fears he’d taught himself to crush down and outrun. After four years away, he no longer felt at home in the world of meaty white guards whose incomes flowed from the prison’s existence and the mostly black and brown convicts who would lose their years behind its walls.

  He never was much of a father to baby Britney, and after a while, Cici gave up on him and married a real adult, a guy who’d gone to their high school and now worked for the prison system as an elevator inspector. It was then that Samson Ray Jr. moved, heading two hours away to become Coach Ray of the Killer Armadillos.

  He hadn’t made it to the NFL. But at least he’d escaped from prison.

  * * *

  Cici, Britney, and Jim, the elevator inspector, lived in a real house, financed through a program that helped responsible prison employees achieve the American dream of homeownership. The real house had a real Christmas tree in one corner, plus Christmas tree–scented candles in most of the other corners, combining to create a Christmas aroma so thick it felt like an assault.

  Britney was playing video games with her cousin on the living room carpet. She didn’t look up until Cici said, “Put that thing on pause and go say hello to…” The sentence finished with a hand wave. She had long ago stopped encouraging Britney to call Samson Jr. anything fatherly.

  Britney sighed as she pushed herself off the floor. Her nails were long and painted a color he hadn’t known nail polish came in. Several bracelets jingled as she greeted him with a stiff-elbowed hug. He was struck by the changes in her. The adults in Huntsville looked the same every year. If anything, they were a little fatter and more tired around the eyes. Britney, on the other hand, seemed new each time he saw her. She was old enough to be one of his students now, with a near-completeness that made him wish he knew what the hell to say to her. Maybe the words existed that could make up for these years of being a stranger, a gesture of her mother’s hand. But he did not know them.

  “You got tall,” he said.

  “Yeah. That happens.”

  “Well, I didn’t know what you wanted for Christmas, but I figured girls your age like to shop for themselves, anyway.”

  Samson waited for confirmation of this statement, but Britney just stared at him from under thin dashes of eyebrows.

  He opened his wallet and handed h
er a hundred-dollar bill. “Just your size, right?”

  “Great. Thanks.” Britney tucked the bill into the pocket of her jeans, which showed off several inches of her skinny teenager’s back as she lowered herself onto the floor and restarted the game.

  Jim the elevator inspector came into the living room.

  “Hey. You want a beer or something?” It was clear this was not really an offer. Rather, it was the type of thing expected of upright men who owned their homes and kept their yards clean.

  “Nah, thanks. Just came by to say merry Christmas to everyone.”

  “All right, well, you have a good one, now.”

  “Look, Dad,” called Britney from the floor. “I’m winning the game!”

  “Nice job,” began Samson Jr., but he quickly fell silent.

  She was talking to Jim.

  “Nice job,” said Jim, reaching down to squeeze Britney’s shoulder.

  The three adults stood for a moment, surrounded by the Christmas tree’s light and the video game’s cheerful music.

  “So,” said Cici, “I’ll walk you out?”

  On the front porch, she pulled out a cigarette. “Anything going on with you?”

  “Just football.”

  Cici laughed. “I guess that’s still your whole life, huh?” She seemed hopeful that the answer would be yes.

  “Yeah, you know me.” The truth was, things weren’t really going all that well. The Armadillos hadn’t made it to the championship after all, and now there was this new movie out about how kids played too much football and were failing their classes, which made Daren Grant feel even more comfortable sitting through practices and typing his secret notes.

  But Samson Jr. wasn’t about to discuss these things with Cici. “How’s everything here?”

  “Great,” said Cici. “Britney’s doing great.”

  “Yeah. Looks like you’re doing a great job with her.”

  “A lot of it is Jim,” said Cici. “He’s really been a… you know, a figure for her.”

  “Right. Seems like it.” Samson Jr.’s hand crept toward his pocket.

  “There is something I wanted to talk to you about, though.” Cici took a long drag on her cigarette and squinted into the distance.

  “Anything you need.” He pulled out the stack of bills he’d brought for just this moment. Every family had a holiday tradition, and this was theirs. Cici would gently poke at his shittiness as a father, making sure to add that child-support checks didn’t nearly cover the cost of raising a kid, and after a while he would give her an extra few hundred bucks. That always shut her up and cleared him until the next year.

  But this time, Cici waved the money away. “I’m not asking for money, SJ.”

  “Okay.” He kept the bills in his hand, just in case.

  “Seriously, we don’t need it. Jim just got a promotion.”

  “Nice. So he’s what now, an elevator inspector inspector?”

  There was a time Cici would have laughed at this, or anything Samson Jr. said, no matter how stupid. But that time had long passed.

  “Look, SJ, I don’t hate you anymore. I’m not even mad at you. But Jim and I have been talking for a while now, about… I mean, he really has raised Britney. We might as well make it official.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Adoption paperwork’s all done. We just need you to sign.”

  Here, again, he was supposed to say something, and probably should have, and probably wanted to, but instead his inner game face turned on, blocking out any reaction. “Well, okay. If that’s what y’all want to do.”

  “And you don’t need to stop by on Christmas anymore.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Not that anyone will notice much of a difference.”

  The money was still in his hand. Unsure what to do with it, he held it out to Cici.

  She pushed it away in disgust. “I guess maybe if Britney were someone you could teach to run with a helmet on, you’d care more, right?”

  “I should probably go. Got a long drive home.”

  He drove fast. The suffocating mixture of smells from the two Huntsville homes lingered on his clothes, following him back to his apartment like a restless spirit.

  * * *

  Whenever the Killer Armadillos lost a game, Coach Ray could not even look at televised football. But as he sat on his couch and flipped through the channels, he hungered for the background noise of commentators, the scoreboard that made it clear who was winning, who was losing, and by how much.

  He’d had to cancel his ESPN subscription to get his truck fixed. Such was the life of a high school football coach paying double child support. But never had its absence weighed upon him so heavily. He would have been fine watching any sport, really. Boxing highlights would have done the trick. Baseball. Even golf.

  But nothing was on except a bunch of stupid family Christmas movies.

  Damned basic cable.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 26

  “HAPPY DAY AFTER Jesus’s Birthday!” said Lena’s father.

  “Happy Day After Jesus’s Birthday,” Lena and her mother echoed, their wine glasses clinking in the half-empty restaurant.

  This was the closest thing the Wrights had to a holiday tradition. On December 26, when most of the country was home eating leftovers, it was easy to get in to the type of restaurant where it was, as her mother liked to say, just impossible to get a reservation. Flying on Christmas Day was also less of a hassle, and so ever since Lena had started college, she’d joined the planes full of Asians, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews who flew on Christian holidays. This year, she’d taken the last flight out.

  So you’re going to Philly, huh? I guess I can’t bring you over for the holidays, then. Nex had said this three weeks earlier as they’d lain together, their heads on the same pillow, staring up at a poster she’d taped to her ceiling. It was the first night he’d ever shared a poem he was working on.

  Racially charged rhetoric results in mass incarceration / Prisons locking up our prophets with a profit motivation…

  Lena remembered only pieces of the poem. It was the night itself she’d relived in detail, until lines of poetry had become linked in her memory with lines from the conversation that surrounded it. This verbal remix played in her head even now, as she stared at the menu in a formerly abandoned music club, reborn during gentrification as a soul food–inspired bistro.

  Lately, she’d begun imagining Nex’s reaction to her daily activities. It almost felt as if he were hovering over her shoulder, a hologram. This was fine, even motivating, when she was in front of a class. But here, holding a menu that for real contained the phrases nouveau neck bone and drizzle of chitlin reduction, she cringed. Breyonna had it wrong: The trendiest, most expensive restaurants did not serve filet mignon. They served artisanal versions of the food poor people ate.

  “So,” Lena’s mother was saying when Lena tuned back in to the conversation, “I guess the other teachers at your school must resent you for working so hard.”

  “What? No—why would they?” But it was too late. They were on this again.

  Her parents had seen How the Status Quo Stole Christmas the day it came out. They took it for granted that she was one of the good teachers Nick Wallabee claimed he would put in every classroom. With Nex hovering over her shoulder, this detail became as frivolous and humiliating as the restaurant itself. Only the most progressive, educated parents assumed their children were solving the problems of the world.

  Raised to represent the real with dreams unrealized / raw grip on reality rarely recognized / boxed into shadow boxes before we ever commit a crime / told, This is where your road ends unless you learn to dunk or rhyme. Lena had read a book about private prisons and had almost mentioned it at that moment. But then she didn’t. She’d long imagined a scene like this one, the two of them sharing poetry in the dark. It felt important to tread lightly.

  Again, her mother’s voice: “Well, considering the quality of teach
ing they’ve been getting away with, they’re probably worried about any challenge to the status quo.”

  “The teachers at my school are fine,” said Lena. “I’ve never met anyone like the teachers described in that movie.” This wasn’t entirely true. Mr. Comodio was pretty bad. But there were more than a hundred other teachers at her school who were fine, plus the inaccuracies in the movie would have taken all night to explain, and moreover, she was desperate to get off the subject before the waitress, who seemed always within inches of their table, arrived with their food.

  “Here we have the braised neck bone and grits with fatback essence, and the slow-roasted pig foot garnished with one flash-fried collard green leaf.” The waitress placed tiny plates in front of Lena’s parents.

  “And the catfish for you, ma’am.” She had a respectable Afro and a calculated subservience in her voice, and was pretty enough that Lena imagined Nex’s hologram watching her with approval. “Don’t worry. It’s not spicy.”

  So you’re going to Philly, huh? I guess I can’t bring you over for the holidays, then. It was the day after this that Lena had bought her plane tickets, choosing the last flight out on Christmas. But when she mentioned her late flight time, Nex had not repeated the invitation.

  This morning, she’d sent a quick hope your holiday was good message, carefully crafted not to sound like she was demanding a response. Now she wondered if she should have just waited to hear from him. Or maybe she had sent her own text too early in the morning, and Nex, after a long night of partying with his family, was still recovering. Or had he texted her? Maybe she just hadn’t heard her phone inside her purse. Her father considered it a crime against restaurant etiquette to check a cell phone at the table.

  She excused herself to the bathroom, phone cupped in her hand.

  No new messages.

  “I definitely agree with what that superintendent says about football, though,” her father was saying when she returned to the table. They were still on the documentary. “These students are risking concussions for a negligible chance to make it in professional sports, and in the long run, no one ever makes it in football. You should see the statistics.”