One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning

The second Friday in May

The night of the pinning I got to the college an hour early, the way they told us to.

I wore my white scrubs, pressed, and white shoes I had bought for clinicals and polished the night before with a rag at the kitchen table.

I had my hair pulled back the way we had to wear it on the floor. There were twenty-three of us in the class.

We had started as thirty-eight. Kim, who sat next to me in every lecture and worked overnights at a gas station, hugged me so hard my name badge bent.

They lined us up in the hallway outside the auditorium. Each of us was given a small white box with our pin inside.

Mine was gold, round, with the college seal and a little lamp on it. I opened the box and looked at it for a long time.

Through the open auditorium doors I could see the rows of folding chairs filling up. Grandparents with canes. Little kids in clip-on ties. A man in a seed-company cap holding a bunch of grocery store carnations.

I found the third row. Jeremy, in his good flannel and his one pair of khakis. Lily, in a sundress and a blue cardigan. My mother, in the lavender dress she wore to weddings and funerals.

And one empty folding chair, between Mom and the aisle.

Lily had laid her blue cardigan across it to hold it. Every few minutes my mother turned around in her seat and looked toward the back of the room. Then she turned forward again and smoothed her skirt.

Six forty-five. Six fifty. The room was nearly full. A woman tried to sit in the empty chair and Lily said something to her, polite, and the woman nodded and moved down.

At six fifty-five the piano started. Our instructor, Mrs. Novak, who had taught nursing for thirty-one years and could still smell a med error across a room, came down the hall and clapped twice.

“Graduates, line up, please.”

I closed the little box and held it in my fist. I took my place in line between Kim and a young man named Tyler who had been a combat medic in the Army and still stood like one.

Then I looked through the doors one more time.

Lily stood up. She was looking toward the back of the auditorium. She reached down and lifted her blue cardigan off the chair and folded it over her arm.

My father was coming down the side aisle.

He was wearing his church suit, the charcoal one he had bought for my wedding and wore every Sunday since. He had shaved. He had the ticket in his hand like he thought someone might ask him for it.

He went down the row past Jeremy, who stood up and shook his hand, and he sat down in the empty chair next to my mother.

Mom put her hand on his knee. He put his hand on top of hers.

Then behind him, standing along the back wall with his hands in his pockets, was my brother Brad.