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gig is.”
    “It’s a job,” David said. “A teaching job in San Francisco. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
    “Dead birds everywhere,” Helena said out loud. “Littering that famous bridge they have over in San Francisco. The Gate Bridge.”
    “Golden.” David was picking off the traces of tape Helena had left at the end of the tub, as if they were already hoping for the security deposit back. “I think we might do better there, scrape scrape scrape,” he and his fingernails said, “and your mother scrape scrape thinks the same thing.”
    Helena’s mother. Helena’s mother. Mother mother mother. Helena thinks of her mother visiting, and that she could throwher into the active volcano. But what if these arguments were wrong? She leaned toward her husband and gave him a big kiss where the book had hit him. This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says. Arguably there was more to this story, and there is. “But what if there’s no volcano?” Helena said. “What am I going to do then?”
    “I imagine,” David said, “you are going to teach.”

particularly
    T he sign in the teachers’ lounge said YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT WORK HERE , presumably referring to cleanliness. At the word lounge Helena had imagined a dark, lovely place, with elegant cocktails and drapery, perhaps an old black-and-white movie on a screen without sound. Instead this was a room with some chairs in it and things taped on the walls. Love is like this, plenty of places to sit but an overall feeling that the room needs a good uptight scrubbing until everything that mentions your mother has been washed away. “I imagine you don’t have a teachers’ lounge in Britain,” said Andrea, Helena’s supervisor.
    “We do not,” Helena said, moving one of the chairs.
    Andrea moved it back. “I imagine you’ll enjoy this job,” she said. “I imagine you have a lot to teach them. We’re giving you afternoons and mornings. In between you can be here, or outside if you’re a smoker.”
    “I’m a smoker,” Helena said. It was true. She was from Britain originally and had published a novel entitled Glee Club . This had led to a position in a creative expression program in a private school, although led was not the right word for how she ended up here, and gig was sometimes what she called it. The answer was money, which had a particular place in Helena’s love story. Sheand her husband needed to buy things pretty much on a regular basis. This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position. Helena had been told it would last until the money ran out. From Helena’s experience, she would say that the money was going to run out in about nine days.
    “It’s a temporary position, like I told you,” said Andrea, who had said no such thing. “Pretty much what happens is, you facilitate the creative expression part. You’re a creative expression facilitator. Get it?”
    Andrea was an ex-girlfriend of Helena’s husband, so she said “Get it?” like one might say, “The same man has seen both of us naked, and prefers you, bitch.”
    “Of course I get it,” Helena said, but she sighed. Things like this had not happened to her in England. She could not explain the difference, perhaps because there wasn’t one. Certainly England had castles, but Helena had not lived in them, although memories of her British life had become more and more glamorous the longer she hung out at hideous places like this.
    “The first thing is, a field trip where the children will see what’s-its on migration. Magpies. It’s sponsored by the Men’s Organization for Magpie Migration for Youth, who are donating their services for free. That’ll take place tomorrow, unless the volcano erupts.” This was a San Francisco joke due to some