One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning

The envelope

In my last semester, the program director sent us all an email about the pinning ceremony. It would be held in the college auditorium on the second Friday in May at seven o’clock.

White uniforms. Each graduate would be given four tickets. Standing room at the back for anyone else.

The pinning ceremony is older than most people know. It goes back to Florence Nightingale.

Before you take your boards, before you are an RN, your school gives you its pin, and somebody you choose pins it over your heart in front of everybody.

I knew right away who would do mine. Lily, who was sixteen now and nearly as tall as me, with her father’s shoulders and my mother’s laugh.

One ticket for Jeremy. One for Lily. One for Mom, which I gave her in person at Easter, in a card, after church. She held it against her chest and didn’t say anything for a while.

That left one.

I sat with it at the kitchen table for a week. Jeremy didn’t ask. Lily did.

“Are you giving it to Grandpa?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You should,” she said. “Then it’s up to him.”

So on a Thursday night in April, after my last night of clinicals on the med-surg floor at the hospital in the county seat, I sat down at the table with an envelope and a pen.

I wrote his name on the front in my best handwriting. Don Kessler. Then the box number and the county road.

I put the ticket inside. I did not write a letter. I had started four of them over six years and thrown every one away.

Anything I wrote would have been either an accusation or a beg, and I did not want to be either one.

One ticket. No note. If he wanted to know what it meant, he could come and find out.

I mailed it the next morning from the post office in town, on my way to the Pines.

He never called.

The next Sunday at dinner, nobody mentioned it. Dad asked about the motel. I said I’d be giving my notice at the end of May.

He looked up at that, just for a second, then went back to his roast.

Mom walked me out to the car.

“He got it,” she said. “He set it on the windowsill over the sink. He hasn’t moved it.”

“Has he said anything?”

“No.” She put a folded twenty in my pocket and patted it flat. “But he hasn’t moved it, Erin. Your father throws everything away. He hasn’t moved it.”