The Clothes My Parents Wore

My father put down his pen. He did not look up for a second, and when he did his eyes were wet, which I had seen exactly twice before in my life, at two funerals. And he said, “Because if you’d known, you’d have tried to stop us. You’d have said you’d stay home a year and work. And you are not going to spend a year of your one life in Corliss working at the Co-op to spare your mother and me a few old shirts we don’t need anyway.” He turned the pen over in his fingers. “We didn’t want one dollar going toward looking good, Nora, when it could go toward you being good at something. Clothes are just clothes. You were never going to be just anything.”

My mother came and stood behind his chair with her hands on his shoulders, in the housedress with the little gray flowers, and she said, “We weren’t ashamed that day. Not for one second. I want you to hear that. I was the proudest woman in that whole parking lot, and I’d have worn a feed sack to get you up those stairs. The only thing that hurt me,” and here she had to stop and start again, “the only thing that hurt me was that it hurt you. And I didn’t want it to. I’d have given anything for it not to hurt you.”

Which is how I learned that she had seen it after all. Of course she had. She had seen the relief on my face when Diane Mercer took my father for the help, and she had carried that small knife in her chest for three months and never once let it show, because she did not want me to carry it too.

I got down on my knees next to my father’s chair, which I had not done since I was a little girl, and I put my head on his arm and I told them both I was sorry, and that I had been a coward, and that I would spend my whole life being worth it. And my father, who is not a hugger except at funerals, put his rough hand on the back of my head and held it there, and said, “You already are. You always were. Now get up off the floor before your mother starts bawling and burns the gravy.”

I did not fix it with money. There was no money to fix it with, and anyway that is not how a thing like that gets fixed. But I did finish. I want you to know that I finished, because that was the whole point of what they did, and the worst thing I could have done with their sacrifice was waste it on guilt. I worked every summer and most weekends and I kept my grades up and I took every scholarship there was to take so the gap never opened that wide again, and four years later I walked across a stage in a cap and gown, the first Pelland ever to do it, and I looked out into that crowd and found them.