Teacher's Delight

Chapter Three Zarina

"Say the actual sentence," Zarina said, already three blocks from the building, already walking faster than the cold really justified. "Whatever it is. Don't make me climb up to it."

Afisa exhaled, the particular exhale that meant she'd been holding something in for longer than a phone call's worth of patience could account for. "Chinedu quit."

Zarina stopped walking. A woman behind her muttered something about the sidewalk and went around.

"Chinedu quit," she repeated, like saying it again might change the tense.

"This morning. Gave two weeks, which is generous of him, all things considered, except two weeks from now is exactly when the second borehole site starts drilling, and he was the only person on the ground who actually understood the water table survey, and I cannot, Zarina, I cannot fly to Kaduna and also keep doing what I'm doing here, there are only so many versions of me."

"Why did he quit."

"Better offer. An oil services company, apparently, paying nearly double what we can."

There it was. The thing underneath the thing. They could not, at their current stage, match oil-money salaries for skilled field engineers, and everyone on both sides of the ocean knew it, and knowing it didn't make it hurt less when it cost them the one person who'd actually walked every meter of the second site and knew where the aquifer ran shallow and where it didn't.

Zarina started walking again because standing still in November in this city was its own kind of punishment, and because moving made it easier to think. "Okay. Okay. Who's next best on the ground?"

"Nobody's next best. That's what I'm telling you. He was the survey."

"Then we requalify. I'll pull the data he already logged, I have his notes from the first site, it's not nothing—"

"Zarina." Afisa's voice did the thing it did when she needed her older sister to actually hear her rather than immediately start solving. "I need you to hear that I am tired. Not — not dramatically. Not in a way that needs fixing tonight. But I have a job here, a whole job, that pays my actual rent, and I am doing that job and then coming home and doing three more hours of yours, and I love you, and I love what we built, and I am running out of hours in the day to be both of these people."

Zarina walked half a block without saying anything, because the honest response — I know, I'm sorry, I don't know how to fix that from here — felt too much like agreeing that something needed to change, and she was not ready to look directly at what that something might be.

"I'll call the drilling contractor tonight," she said instead. "Buy us two more weeks on the timeline. That takes the immediate pressure off."

"That takes tonight's pressure off," Afisa said, not unkindly, but precisely, in a way that reminded Zarina uncomfortably of a certain finance professor's habit of making people repeat themselves until the gap in their reasoning showed. "It doesn't take mine off. I'm not asking you to fix Chinedu tonight. I'm telling you I'm tired, because if I don't say it out loud eventually you're going to look up in a year and wonder why I sound like a stranger."

"You don't sound like a stranger."

"Not yet."

The line went quiet in the particular way it did when neither of them wanted to be the one to escalate. Zarina reached her building, let herself in through the door that stuck if you didn't lift the handle a certain way, and climbed the two flights to the flat she shared with Sugar with her shoulder wedging the phone against her ear the whole way.

"I'll figure something out," Zarina said, finally, quieter. "I always do."

"I know you do. That's actually part of the problem, but I don't have the energy to explain that tonight either." A pause, softer. "Go eat something. You get like this — all logistics, no dinner. I can hear it in your voice."

"I love you."

"I love you too. Call the drilling people. And Zarina—" A beat. "Eventually you're going to have to actually think about the PhD thing instead of just filing it under later. Not tonight. Just — eventually."

The call ended before Zarina could decide whether to be annoyed or grateful that her sister had said the thing she herself had been carefully not thinking for three weeks.

She let herself into the flat. Sugar was on the couch with a bowl of cereal at seven in the evening, which was either dinner or a mood, possibly both, laptop open to something with a lot of spreadsheet-green in it.

"You've got the face," Sugar said, without looking up.

"What face."

"The one where Afisa called and now you're going to spend the next two hours doing math instead of talking about your actual feelings." Sugar patted the couch cushion beside her without breaking eye contact with her screen. "Sit. Tell me which one it is. Business math or McIntyre math."

"There's no McIntyre math."

"There is absolutely McIntyre math. You've had McIntyre math since September." Sugar finally looked over, and whatever she saw in Zarina's face made her set the cereal down, which from Sugar was the equivalent of another person standing up and clearing their throat. "Okay. Business first, then. Tell me what's on fire."

Zarina dropped her bag, peeled off her coat, and sat, and for the first time since leaving the building where a man who used to smile at her had made her repeat a correct answer just to hear her say it twice, let some of the careful architecture in her shoulders come down.

"Chinedu quit," she said. "The water table survey engineer. Two weeks' notice, right before the second borehole site starts drilling."

"That's bad."

"That's very bad." Zarina reached for her laptop, opened the drilling contractor's contact information, and started, in the only language she fully trusted under pressure, to build a plan.