One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning

What my mother did

My mother never said a word against my father in her life. Not in front of me. But somewhere in that first year, she started doing things.

On Sunday afternoons, while Dad was in the recliner watching the Lions lose, she would walk me out to the car.

And she would put a folded bill in my coat pocket, a twenty or a forty, and pat it flat.

“For gas,” she would say. That was all.

Once she pressed a Ziploc of homemade cookies into my hands and said, “For your study group.” I had never told her I had a study group. She must have heard it from Lily.

When I finished anatomy with an A, I mentioned it at Sunday dinner. Just mentioned it, passing the green beans. Mom smiled into her plate.

Dad asked how things were going at the motel, and whether Jeff ever got the roof fixed on the back units.

That was the pattern for six years. He asked about the motel. He never asked about school. I don’t think it was meanness.

I think he had decided a long time ago what my life was, and it was easier for him to talk about the part that fit.

Brad sent his Christmas card every year with a picture of his wife and their two boys in matching sweaters.

He wrote “Hope you are well. Love, Brad” in the same careful engineering print. He never mentioned school. I assumed he didn’t know, or didn’t care.

I was wrong about that. But I didn’t find out until the parking lot.

Twice I almost quit

The first time was February of my third year, the week before my pharmacology midterm. I was coming home from class on the state highway in sleet when the transmission in my Impala started slipping, and then quit.

I coasted onto the shoulder with the flashers going. It was nine fifty at night, twelve degrees, and I sat there in the dark with my textbook on the passenger seat and the heat dying, and I thought, this is it. This is God telling me what Dad told me.

Jeremy came and got me with his brother’s truck and a tow strap. The mechanic said eighteen hundred dollars for a rebuilt transmission.

We put it on the credit card and I did not sleep that night, adding it up.

Two weeks later I failed the pharmacology exam. Seventy-five was passing in our program. I got a seventy-two. Three points.

The rule was you could not go on to the next course without passing pharmacology, so I would have to take the whole course over, which put me back a semester.

I sat in the car in the college lot afterward and could not make myself start it. I called Jeremy and told him I was done.

I said it out loud. I said, “I’m done, I’m too old for this, and my father was right.”

Jeremy didn’t argue with me. He just said, “Come home and we’ll talk about it.”

When I came out to the car the next morning for my shift at the Pines, there was a note taped to the steering wheel. It was on lined paper torn out of Lily’s spiral notebook, in purple marker.

“Nurses don’t quit, Mom.”

She was thirteen. She had written it the night before after she heard me on the phone, and she had snuck out in her pajamas in the cold to tape it there.

I kept that note in the sun visor of the car for four years. It went through two oil changes and one more transmission scare and it is in my Bible now, pressed flat, with the tape gone yellow.

I retook pharmacology the next fall and got an eighty-eight.