The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

The Book

When the yearbooks came in May of 1976, I tucked the tally sheet inside the back cover of mine. I am not sure why. I think I wanted it somewhere I would have to see it. Or somewhere I would never have to.

I married Gene Hagen three years later. He farmed with his dad, then on his own, corn and beans and a few feeder calves when the prices were right. I kept books for the co-op for thirty-one years and for half the churches in the county on the side.

The yearbook moved with us four times. The tally sheet stayed inside the back cover. I opened that book maybe once every ten years, at reunion time, and every time I did, the sheet slid out and lay there on the kitchen table looking at me.

Gene saw it the first time in 1986, our tenth reunion. He picked it up because it was a ledger sheet, and anything with columns of numbers interested him.

“What’s this, Marly?”

So I told him. All of it. The library, the radiator, Rodney’s jacket, Connie’s voice going down instead of up.

“That’s yours to carry or set down,” he said. “Either one, I’ll back you.”

“You don’t think I should have told?”

“I think you were seventeen and scared of a linebacker,” he said. “I think I’d have been scared of a linebacker. What I think now doesn’t matter much. It’s what you think.”

That was Gene. He never once told me what to do about it. He also never once told me it did not matter.

It mattered. It mattered more every year, not less. That is the thing nobody tells you about keeping quiet. At seventeen I was afraid. By thirty I was ashamed, and shame is heavier than fear because you cannot outgrow it.

I would see Darlene at the grocery store in town. She married Vern Pruitt, who drove a milk truck and later ran the farm with her after her dad passed. They had three boys. She stayed quiet her whole life, the kind of woman who brings two pans of bars to a funeral lunch and leaves before anyone can thank her.

Every time I saw her in the cereal aisle, I thought: Tell her. Just tell her.

And every time, I thought: Tell her what? That she lost something she never knew she had? That the whole school picked her once, and I let it get stolen? What good would that do her in a cereal aisle in 1994?