The Account My Grandfather Asked About

I took out my first student loan that fall. I remember sitting in the financial aid office of that university, a stranger’s office, signing my name to a debt that would follow me for the next fourteen years, while less than forty miles from that desk sat an account with my name already on it, closed, its contents long gone.

I was twenty seven the year I dropped two classes and picked up a second shift at the diner on the county road, because tuition and a car payment together were more than I could carry on the wages of a nursing assistant working overnights at the county care center. My mother cried with me that year too. She held my hand across that same kitchen table and told me she wished there was something she could do.

There was. There had been, the entire time. I just did not know to ask the right question, because nobody had ever given me a reason to think there was a right question to ask.

I remember one more year clearly, the summer I was twenty five, sitting on my parents’ back porch shelling peas with my mother while my father worked on the truck in the driveway. I had just been turned down for a small loan I wanted to start a mobile grooming route out to the ranches past the county line, something to fill my days off from the care center, and I told her how discouraged I felt, how every door I tried seemed to stay shut no matter how hard I leaned on it. She put her hand over mine on the porch rail and said some people just have to work twice as hard for half as much, and that she was sorry it had turned out to be me. I thanked her for saying that. I meant it.