The Name Tag at Our Class Reunion

The letter to the courthouse

I want to explain how I ended up on the program, because it matters.

In April, a letter came to the clerk’s office addressed to “The County Clerk of Courts.” It was from the Pruett High School Class of 1996 Reunion Committee. They were having a thirty-year reunion in the gym in July, and they wanted “a county official to say a few words of welcome to our returning classmates.”

My chief deputy, Donna, opened the mail. She is sixty-one and does not waste time. She put it on my calendar, wrote YES on the letter, and mailed back the reply card with the box checked. She did not ask me, because she knew I would say yes to anything in this county that came with a microphone and a free supper.

I didn’t see it until a week later. By then it was done.

I could have called and told them who I was. I thought about it. But the letter was signed by Heather Lamb, chairwoman, and I knew Heather. And I thought, honestly, that she must have known. Everybody in this county knows who the clerk of courts is. My name is on the side of the courthouse door.

What I didn’t think about was that Heather had moved to Columbus after college and only moved back two years ago, after her divorce. She’d been gone for twenty-five years. She had never seen my name on a door. She had looked at a list of county offices and picked one.

A month later, a separate letter came to my house. It was the reunion invitation. Eighty-five dollars per person, dinner and DJ included, RSVP by June first. It had been mailed to everyone who was ever in the class, whether they graduated or not.

I wrote a check for eighty-five dollars and mailed it in. Mike wasn’t class of ’96, so it was just me.

Heather

Heather Lamb was head cheerleader from our sophomore year on. She had long blonde hair she wore in a high ponytail with a blue and gold ribbon, and she was the kind of pretty that made teachers nicer to you.

She was not cruel to me in high school. That’s not the right word. She just didn’t see me, the way pretty girls in small towns sometimes don’t see the girls who live on the wrong end of Spring Street.

The week I left school, I heard her in the hall outside the girls’ bathroom. She said, “Well, what did she expect,” and somebody laughed. That was all. Thirty-one years later, I could still hear exactly how she said it.

So when I stood in the gym doorway with that name tag in my hand, I did not think it was an accident.

The decision

Lori was still looking at me with her face crumpled up.

“I can make you a new one,” she said. She was already reaching for a blank tag and the marker. “Let me just make you a new one.”

“No,” I said. “Leave it. I’ll wear this one.”

“Tammy.”

“It’s all right, Lori. I paid my eighty-five dollars. I came to see people. I’m not going to stand here and hold up the line over a sticker.”

I could have asked for my money back. I could have walked straight out to the car and called Mike and gone home and never thought about the class of ’96 again. That would have been easy.

But I had driven over in my good navy blazer, and I had come to see Lori and Kim and Denise and Mrs. Moss, and I was not going to let a piece of paper decide where I spent my Saturday night.

Mike had offered to come. He’d offered that afternoon, standing in the kitchen with his coffee, when I told him I was nervous. “I’ll put a clean shirt on,” he said. “I’ll stand in the corner and look mean.”

“You’ll stand in the corner and talk to the DJ about his truck,” I said.

“That too.”

But he had a tow call at four, a farmer’s grain truck broke down on State Route 15 with a load on, and that’s how it is when you’re married to a mechanic. I told him to go. I told him I was forty-eight years old and could walk into a gym by myself.

So I peeled the back off the name tag. I didn’t put it on my blazer, not yet. I stuck it on the strap of my purse, where I could see it, and I walked into the gym.