One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning

The Pines

The Pines Motel had twenty-two rooms in an L around a gravel lot and a sign with a pine tree on it that buzzed at night.

Most of the guests were pipeline crews, hunters in November, and families on their way up north to the lakes in summer.

The manager was a heavy, kind man named Jeff who had bought the place with his brother and never got it out of debt.

He gave me the long side of the L and a linen cart with one bad front wheel that pulled hard to the left.

“Everybody fights that cart,” Jeff said. “You’ll learn to lean on it.”

I did fifteen rooms a shift, sometimes sixteen. Strip the beds, sheets in the bag, towels in the other bag.

Bathroom first, because the bleach has to sit. Then the beds, the dusting, the vacuum, the little soaps, the coffee packets, the trash.

Hunters left blood in the tubs. Pipeline men left mud on everything.

Once a family from Ohio left a thank-you note on the pillow and a five-dollar bill, and I cried in room nine because I was so tired, and because somebody had noticed.

My hands cracked from the bleach. By the second winter they split at the knuckles and bled into my gloves.

I bought a tub of bag balm at the feed store, the same green tin my father used to keep in his truck, and slept with my hands slathered in it and wrapped in socks.

At two o’clock I punched out. I ate a sandwich in the car in the motel lot, peanut butter on wheat, and studied flash cards until it was time to drive the twenty-six miles to the college in the county seat.

Class ran from five to nine thirty, three nights a week, sometimes four.

Anatomy and physiology with a professor who drew the heart on the whiteboard so well you could almost hear it. Chemistry, which nearly killed me. Microbiology, statistics, psychology, nutrition.

Jeremy worked days at the plant and came home at three thirty. He took Lily from then on.

He learned to make four suppers, badly, and then two of them well. He signed every permission slip and sat through every band concert and texted me pictures from the bleachers.

On the nights I got home at ten, he would have a plate in the microwave for me with a paper towel over it.

Sometimes Lily would be asleep on the couch in her clothes because she had tried to wait up.

In the second year Jeremy said what he had been chewing on for a long time.

“I want to drive out and talk to your dad,” he said. “Man to man. Just tell him what you’re doing. What it’s costing you.”

“No,” I said.

“Erin.”

“If Dad shows up for any of this, I don’t want it to be because you made him. I want it to be because he figured it out.”

Jeremy did not like it. But he respected it. He is a man who will drive forty minutes to help a stranger pull a trailer out of a ditch, and he did not drive the eleven miles to my parents’ house, because I asked him not to. That was its own kind of strength.