The Clothes My Parents Wore

The semester went the way those first semesters go. I was homesick and I hid it. I made friends, including Paige, who turned out to be nothing like her mother, a sweet distractible girl who left her hair in the sink drain and cried over her biology grade and loved me without conditions. I ate in the dining hall and marveled that you could take as much as you wanted. I called home on Sunday nights, and my mother would put my father on, and he would say about four sentences, mostly about the weather and the price of corn, and then say, “Well, this is long distance,” even though it was not long distance anymore, because that is a thing men his age say, and hand the phone back.

I did not go home for fall break. I told them it was because of a group project, which was a small lie on top of the big one. The truth was I did not want to get back in that truck. I did not want to drive the four hours west and watch the land go flat and the towns go small and remember exactly where I came from. I wanted to be a Weldon State girl. I wanted the new me and not the old one.

In October my mother sent a card. She sent cards the way some mothers send texts, constantly, for no reason, in her round careful handwriting. This one had a cardinal on it and inside she had written that the leaves were turning on the Loup and that she had put up twenty quarts of tomatoes and that she had seen my old teacher Mrs. Cudahy at the Co-op and told her how well I was doing. And at the bottom she wrote, “Daddy and I are so proud we could bust. Don’t you worry about a thing out here. You just learn.” There was a ten dollar bill folded inside. I knew, even then, that they did not have ten dollars to fold into cards. I spent it on pizza with Paige and did not think hard about it, because thinking hard about it would have cost me something.

The thing that cracked me open did not happen at school. It happened over Thanksgiving, when I finally did go home, because even I could not invent a reason to skip Thanksgiving.

My father picked me up at the bus stop in Grand Island in the orange truck. It was dark and cold and the heater only worked on the highest setting, so we drove the last hour with it roaring and the two of us shouting pleasantly over it about nothing. When we turned off the highway onto the county road, the headlights swung across the Pelland mailbox and the long dirt drive and the yard light on its pole, and something in my chest I had been holding tight all fall let go, and I was glad, against my own will, to be home.