One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning

The years in between

I did get married. That part he got right.

I met Jeremy Mayfield at a Friday night football game the fall after I graduated.

He was standing at the fence in a Carhartt jacket eating a hot dog, and he asked me if I knew the score, and I said I didn’t, and he said he didn’t either.

We were married two years later at the Methodist church in town, and the reception was in the VFW hall with a sheet cake and a polka band from Saginaw.

My father danced with me to “My Girl” and cried a little, which surprised everyone.

Jeremy got on at the tire plant on the edge of town. It was good work, union work, and hard on his back.

I worked the counter at the hardware store, then the bank drive-through, then the hardware store again.

Lily was born when I was twenty-five. She came out bald and furious and perfect.

The first nurse who handed her to me was a woman about my mother’s age named Pat, who had a pen behind her ear and the calmest hands I had ever seen.

Pat stayed past the end of her shift the night Lily wouldn’t latch.

She sat on the edge of my bed and showed me, three times, without ever once making me feel stupid. When she left she squeezed my foot through the blanket.

I thought about Pat for years. I thought about her every time I folded laundry or stood at the bank window counting out somebody’s twenties.

That is what I had wanted to be, a person who knows what to do when the scared thing happens.

Sunday dinners went on. Mom made roast on the first Sunday of the month, and we all went out to the farmhouse on the county road.

Brad came when he could from Indianapolis, where he had moved for a job designing parts for diesel engines.

Brad was good to Lily. He sent her a check on her birthday every year and a box of books every Christmas.

He and I were polite with each other, the way grown siblings are when there is something sitting between them that neither of them has named.

Thirty-five

The year I turned thirty-five, Lily was ten. She came home from school one day in March with a paper about what she wanted to be when she grew up.

She had written “a vet for cows,” and drawn a cow with a stethoscope.

At the bottom the teacher had asked the kids to write what their parents wanted to be when they were little. Lily had left that part blank.

“What did you want to be?” she asked me.

I was at the stove. I stirred the chili for a while before I answered.

“A nurse,” I said.

“Why didn’t you?”

I didn’t know how to tell a ten-year-old that her grandpa had said no. So I said I had gotten busy.

Lily looked at me with her head tipped the way Jeremy does when he is deciding whether a tire is really flat.

“You’re not busy now,” she said. “You’re just making chili.”

That night I sat at the kitchen table with Jeremy after Lily went to bed. I had the community college website up on the laptop. The nursing program had an evening track, for people who worked days.

“It’s six years, probably,” I said. “Maybe five, if I don’t fail anything. I’d have to do the prerequisites part time first. Anatomy, chemistry, microbiology, all of it. Then two years in the program itself, and you have to get in.”

Jeremy read over my shoulder. He had just come off a shift and smelled like rubber and the orange hand soap at the plant.

“So do it,” he said.

“It’s money we don’t have.”

“Then we’ll get it.”

I took out loans. Over six years they came to about $14,000, with a Pell grant on top of that the first two years, and that still did not cover books, uniforms, the stethoscope, the background check, the drug screen, the board fee, or the gas.

So I needed a job that ended early enough for class at five. The Pines Motel out on the state highway was hiring housekeepers, eight to two. I applied on a Tuesday and started on a Thursday.

People have asked me since why I didn’t go to my father. He had money put away. He had a paid-off farmhouse and a pension from Great Lakes Feed. He had paid sixty-two thousand dollars for Brad.

The plain answer is that you only have to hear a thing like that once. I had asked him at eighteen, standing in his driveway, and he had told me what he thought I was for.

I was not going to stand in that driveway again at thirty-five and hear it a second time.