The Seats They Took at Graduation
Commencement Day
Hendrix Fieldhouse holds about four thousand people on a good day, folding chairs on the gym floor and bleachers rising on both sides, more Future Farmers of America jackets and church dresses in that crowd than anything you would call formal. It smelled like popcorn from the concession stand that never quite closes, and somewhere up in the bleachers a toddler was crying through the opening remarks in the universal key of every commencement ever held.
I found Virginia’s cardigan first, three sections over from where my parents sat, seated with two women from the Bethel Springs church prayer circle who had ridden up together in one car specifically so Virginia would not have to drive an hour and a half home by herself afterward, win or lose, award or no award.
I found my parents second. My father had aged more than thirteen years should have aged him, thinner through the face, gray at the temples in a way that made him look less like a man I had once been afraid of and more like a stranger reading a program he had bought at the door. My mother sat with her hands folded exactly the way she had folded them in a hospital hallway once, and I understood, watching her from behind that curtain, that some habits outlast every single thing that used to justify them.
Nick sat between them, in a collared shirt, scrolling his phone before the processional started the same way he had scrolled it in a doctor’s office thirteen years earlier. He did glance up once, found me in the line of graduates crossing behind the stage, and gave a small, uncertain nod that I chose, in the moment, to receive as neither an apology nor an insult. Just a nod. I let it be exactly that much and no more.
The dean of the university opened the ceremony with the usual welcome. The provost read the usual list of honors. Six hundred names, more or less, would be called that afternoon, and I had long since made peace with the fact that mine would be one small moment among hundreds, over almost as soon as it started, which is exactly the kind of graduation an ordinary state school gives you and exactly the kind I had wanted.
Then Dean Farrow stepped up to introduce the College of Nursing’s individual honors, and I felt my whole body go still in a way it had not gone still since a hallway thirteen years before.