The Clothes My Parents Wore

She said, “I about cried when your mama brought in that camel coat. I told her, Carol, this is too good, let me give you what it’s worth, and she wouldn’t hear it. She said, Glenda, I need it to sell fast, not sell high, put it in the window where a town woman will see it and want it. And she took less than half what I’d have given her, so it would move quick, because” and here Glenda stopped, because she saw my face, and she said, more gently, “Honey. You didn’t know.”

I said I did not know.

Glenda came back around the counter and she made me sit down on the stool by the register and she told me the rest of it, all of it, the whole shape of the thing my parents had done and hidden, and I am going to tell it to you now plainly, the way I finally held it in my two hands.

When my financial aid letter came in July, there was a gap. A big one. A number with four figures in it that nobody in my family had lying around, because nobody in my family had ever had four figures lying around. My father farms rented ground and owns a little of his own, and in a good year he clears enough to live and in a bad year he does not, and that year the corn was poor. The simple math of it was that I was not going to be able to go. The deadline to pay was the twelfth of August. Move in was the last week of August. There were nineteen days in between where my whole future hung on money that did not exist.

And my parents, without telling me, without one word, went and got it.

My father sold his good suit and his black church boots. He sold a shotgun that had been his father’s, a Browning he had hunted pheasant with every fall of his life, to a man in Ord who had wanted it for years. He sold the camel coat and my mother’s good dresses and a strand of real pearls that had come down from my grandmother, the only truly fine thing my mother owned, that she had been saving to give me on my wedding day. She sold it to Glenda’s cousin for a third of its worth so it would sell fast.

My mother took a second job. All fall, while I was eating all I wanted in the dining hall, my mother was driving to the nursing home in Burwell four nights a week to clean, after her day job at the school cafeteria, scrubbing floors from eight to midnight for a wage I will not insult by writing it here. My father hired himself out on weekends to a bigger operation to the south, running their grain cart through harvest, so that the two incomes together, plus everything they had sold out of their own closets and off their own walls, came to just exactly the four figure number on my aid letter, and not a dollar more.