Office Hours

He knocks even though the door is open. Some of them do that. Usually the ones who've been in the military. "Professor Alvarez. You got a minute?" "I've got office hours. That's the whole point. Sit down." Reyes is thirty-four, a former Marine, and he writes the way he probably folded his bunk, which is to say with a lot of care and no risk. His first essay was about his grandmother's kitchen and it was competent and it was dead on the page and I wrote at the bottom, "Where are you in this?" and he'd come to see me about that, and I'd said, "You can tell me about the kitchen or you can tell me about you in the kitchen, and only one of those is an essay," and he'd nodded like he was taking an order. Today he doesn't sit. He stands in the door with his backpack on both shoulders. "I'm going to withdraw," he says. "Wanted to tell you in person." "Okay. Why?" "It's not the class. The class is fine. I just, I got a job offer. A real one. Logistics company. Pays more than I'll make with a degree, honestly." "Probably true." He blinks. He expected an argument. "Sit down anyway," I say. "I want to show you something." I pull up his second essay. The one about the drive from Twentynine Palms to his mom's house in Bakersfield after he got out. He'd written it in a week, after I'd said the thing about the kitchen, and it was the first thing he'd handed me that had a pulse. There's a paragraph in the middle about a gas station where he sat in the car for forty minutes and couldn't make himself go in and buy a coffee. He never explains why. He just describes the light on the pumps. "Read that paragraph," I say. He reads it. His jaw does something. "You wrote that," I say. "Not me. I didn't teach you that. I just told you where to look." "Yeah." "Take the job. Seriously. Take it. I'm not going to tell you a degree is worth more than a paycheck, because I've been on this salary for twenty-two years and I'd be lying. But I want you to know that you can do this. The thing. The writing. Not in a hobby way. In a way that matters, that could matter, to someone reading it who sat in a car outside a gas station and didn't have the words."

He's quiet for a while. There's a kid in the hallway laughing at something on his phone. The radiator's doing its thing. "You do the evening section too, right?" he says. "The Thursday one?" "Six to nine." "If I took the job. Could I switch to that?" "It's full." "Oh." "It's full, but I'm the one who decides that, and I've never once in twenty-two years turned away someone who walked in and asked. So." He laughs. First time I've heard it. It's a short laugh, surprised out of him. "Thursday," he says. "Bring the gas station piece. We're going to work on the ending." He goes. I sit there a minute. I've got fourteen more of these to do this semester, and some of them won't come back, and I'll have said the same thing and it won't have landed, and I'll never know why. That's the job. You say it to everyone and it lands on some of them. Thursday he's in the second row with a coffee. I don't say anything about the coffee. Neither does he.