Chapter 29: The Box You Check
I did not stop applying for other work after Marisol hired me. Twenty-six hours a week is twenty-six hours a week.
Between the fourth week and the twelfth I put in nineteen applications for weekend and evening work.
I kept them on the left-hand pages of the notebook. EMPLOYER. DATE. METHOD. RESULT.
Warehouse pick-and-pack, two. Overnight stocking at a grocery, three. Hotel housekeeping, two.
Call centre, four. Care home kitchen, one. Data entry at a title company, one.
Filing at a dental office, one. Laundry plant, two. Cleaning contractor, three.
Nineteen applications. Nineteen results. Fourteen never answered at all.
Three answered to say the position had been filled, which is sometimes true.
Two brought me in.
The laundry plant interview lasted six minutes. A man named Ferris walked me along the line and showed me the folder machine.
He said the shift was ten hours and started at six p.m.
He asked if I could lift forty pounds repeatedly. I said yes. He said good.
Then he slid a form across and said, “We do a background check. Everybody.” He said, “It's the client, not me.”
The form is one page. Name, other names used, date of birth, last four of your social, and a signature authorising a consumer report.
Above the signature line there is a paragraph in six-point type about your rights under the federal act.
I read the six-point type. I always read the six-point type. It is the only advantage the certificate ever gave me.
Then I signed it, because refusing to sign is the same as answering the question.
Eleven days later a letter came to Cranmore in a windowed envelope.
A pre-adverse action notice, with a copy of the report they had run clipped behind it.
Two pages.
Two pages is what I am to anybody with eighteen dollars.
I know it is eighteen dollars because I ordered my own.
That was the ninth week. The state police run a criminal history request by mail.
You send a form, a set of prints taken at an authorised location, and a fee.
Prints were free at the sheriff's substation on Tuesdays between one and three.
That meant an unpaid hour, which Marisol allowed and docked without comment.
The clerk rolled my fingers on a glass plate and wiped them with a cloth afterwards.
She had done it ten thousand times. Her hands were kind and completely impersonal.
The fee was eighteen dollars by money order, and the money order cost a dollar sixty-five.
So the fee was nineteen sixty-five. The report came back in nine days.
Line one: my name, last, first, middle.
Line two: date of birth, sex, height, weight as recorded at booking.
The weight was wrong by fourteen pounds in the direction you would expect.
Then the entry. Arrest date. Arresting agency. Charge. Statute number.
Disposition: convicted, plea of guilty. Sentence. Custody. Release date. Supervision end date.
The whole entry is nine lines. The offence is described in four words.
A person reads it in about eleven seconds.
I read it eleven times on the back step at Kesler Street, once for every second it takes somebody else.
Nothing on it is untrue. I want to say that clearly, because of everything that came later.
Every line on that report was accurate to the record.
The record was the problem, and I did not know that yet, and I want the order of what I knew to stay honest.
I also had a paralegal certificate.
Two hundred and forty classroom hours, run inside the facility by a community college, final examination passed at ninety-one.
It is printed on cream card stock with a blue seal that is printed and not embossed.
I did not put it on the laundry plant application. I had learned by then.
A certificate on a felon's application does not read as qualified. It reads as a person who had time.
The title company was the one place I did put it.
The woman on the phone was warm for ninety seconds.
Then she said, “Can I ask — is there anything on your record?”
I said, “Yes. A felony. Vehicular homicide.”
There is a particular silence after that. It has a length. About two seconds.
She said she would keep my details on file. Nobody has ever kept my details on file.
The laundry plant sent the adverse action notice thirteen days after the first letter.
It came with another copy of the report and another copy of my rights.
I now held three copies of my own criminal history in a room where I owned one locker.
I put two in the recycling bin behind the office and folded the third into the back of the notebook.
Then I went home and did not read the medical records.
I pulled the plea transcript instead. Thirty-one pages.
And underneath it, three pages, the thing I had been putting off since the envelope came.