One Ticket to My Nursing Pinning
What he did with his checkbook
I thought he would reach for his wallet. I was ready for it, and I was ready to say no.
I did not want his money now. I had my loans and my pin and I had done it, and nobody was going to buy that back.
He didn’t reach for his wallet. He looked past me, at Lily, who was leaning against the truck in her sundress with her cardigan over her arm, pretending not to listen.
“Lily,” he said. “Come here a minute, honey.”
She came over. She looked at me first, and I nodded.
“What do you want to study?” my father asked her. “When you go. What do you want to be?”
Lily didn’t hesitate. She never has.
“A vet,” she said. “Large animal. Cows, mostly. I want to go to State.”
My father looked at her for a long moment. Something moved in his face.
Thirty years of driving farm to farm, feed and mineral and calf starter, sitting in dairy barns with men worried sick over a sick herd, and his granddaughter wanted to be the person they called.
“I’ll pay for it,” he said. “All of it. Whatever it takes. Undergrad and vet school both.”
Lily’s mouth fell open. She looked at me.
I looked at my father.
“You’ll tell her why,” I said.
He turned to me.
“Not me, Dad. You. You’ll tell her yourself, why you’re doing this for her. All of it. Grandpa and Aunt Joan and the driveway and Brad. She’s sixteen. She’s old enough. If you’re going to do it, she’s going to know why.”
It was quiet for a while. A car started a few rows over. Somewhere in the lobby, someone was still clapping.
My father nodded. He took Lily by the elbow, gently, the way he used to take my mother into church, and walked her over to the bench by the flagpole. They sat down.
I watched him talk. I couldn’t hear it. I saw him hold up his hands at one point, empty, the way a man does when he is admitting something.
I saw Lily put her hand on his arm. I saw him take out his handkerchief, his good one, the one Mom irons for Sundays.
They sat there for twenty minutes. When they came back, Lily’s eyes were red.
She went straight to me and put her arms around my waist, the way she used to when she was small, and didn’t say anything at all.
Jeremy put his hand on my back.
“You okay?” he said quietly.
“I’m okay.”
“You want to go home?”
“No,” I said. “I want to go eat.”
The pin on his lapel
We went to the family restaurant on the highway in the county seat, the one with the pie case by the register.
Jeremy pushed two tables together. There were six of us, counting Brad, who had cancelled his hotel and said he’d drive back to Indianapolis in the morning.
Dad ordered the hot turkey sandwich, like always. Brad ordered the same thing, which made Mom laugh.
Lily got pancakes, because you could get pancakes all day there, and because she was sixteen and it had been a long night.
Halfway through supper, my mother reached into her purse and pressed something small into my hand under the table. I looked down.
It was my father’s thirty-year pin from Great Lakes Feed and Grain. A little gold oval with a wheat sheaf on it and a tiny 30 in the corner.
They gave it to him at the retirement dinner in the Grange hall, along with a clock that has not kept good time since.
He had never worn it. He kept it in his top dresser drawer in the box it came in, under his socks.
“I thought you might want it tonight,” Mom said quietly. “I didn’t know for what. I just brought it.”
I sat there with it in my palm. Then I knew what for.
I stood up and went around the table to my father’s chair. He looked up at me with gravy on his fork. I took the pin out of its box.
I leaned down and fastened it to the lapel of his charcoal church suit, right over his heart, where Lily had put mine.
He sat very still while I did it.
“Thirty years you went out on that route,” I said. “Rain and snow. You earned that one.”
I touched the pin on my scrubs.
“I earned this one.”
I straightened his lapel.
“So we’re even, Dad.”
He put his hand over the pin. He didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he reached up and put that same hand on the side of my face, which he had not done since I was a little girl with a fever.
“We’re not even,” he said. “But thank you for saying it.”
Brad was looking at his plate. Jeremy was looking at the ceiling. Mom was crying again, quietly this time, into a paper napkin.
And Lily, my Lily, picked up her phone and took a picture of her grandfather and me, and it is on my refrigerator now, next to her old note about cows.