The Sign She Held At The Fence

Then he reached over the top rail and put his diploma cover in my hands.

It was blue leatherette with the school seal in gold. It was empty, they always are, the real paper comes in the mail in June. I did not care. I have never held anything that weighed more.

“That’s yours,” he said. “You hold it. You did most of it.”

I could not talk. I laid the sign against the fence and held that cover against my chest with both arms, right over Mrs. Tate’s gold cross.

I heard the latch before I saw her.

Mrs. Pomeroy had followed him across the track, a woman of sixty-three in her flat shoes. She lifted the latch on the walk gate, the one I had set my chair beside, and swung it wide open.

“Shelly Dawson,” she said, in the same voice she used to say line up, friends. “I have had you on my list as that child’s mother for thirteen years, and I am not going to change my records tonight. Come in here. Bring your chair.”

“Nancy, I don’t have a ticket,” I said.

“I am the senior sponsor,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “I just wrote you one.”

Gene Yoder folded my lawn chair for me and handed it through the gate.

I walked onto that track carrying a diploma cover and a poster board. Trevor took the chair from Gene with one hand and took my elbow with the other, the way his father does.

That was when the stands came up.

It did not start with Rick. I want to tell you who it started with, because it matters.

It started with a woman in a yellow dress in the fourth row.

Kim stood up first. She stood up by herself, before anyone around her knew what they were looking at, and she put her hands together over her head and clapped. She was crying as hard as I was. I could see it from the track.

Then her mother stood. Then her daddy in his bolo tie. Then the row behind them, and then the whole home side came up like a wave, two hundred and forty-some people out of a town that knows whose child you are.

Rick was not in the stands by then.

Rick had gone down the bleacher steps two at a time the second Trevor turned right, and he was coming around the end of the track with his hat in his hand, not running, because he is fifty and has a bad knee, but not walking either.

He got to us at the forty-yard line. He did not say anything. He put one arm around his son’s neck and the other around me and stood there with his forehead down against the top of my head.

“You should have told me,” he said into my hair.

“I know it.”

“I’d have stood out here with you.”

“I know that too,” I said. “That’s why.”

Mrs. Pomeroy let us have about ten seconds. Then she tapped her clipboard.

“Mr. Dawson, you have a seat in row one, and Mr. Hobbs has fifty-three more names,” she said. “Trevor, go sit down. Shelly, you set that chair right here by me at the foot of the steps. I could use the help. These gowns are too long.”

So that is where I watched the rest of my stepson’s graduation. Inside the fence, at the bottom of the plywood steps, next to his kindergarten teacher, with a diploma cover in my lap. Rick stood behind my chair with his hand on my shoulder, and nobody asked him for a ticket either.