The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

The Letter From the School

In August, a letter came to me as reunion treasurer. Our school had a tradition I had forgotten about, or maybe they had just started it. The class celebrating its fiftieth reunion would crown the new homecoming queen at halftime.

Mr. Larson, the principal, wrote it in a very nice way. The reunion class could pick one classmate to do the crowning. The class would also provide the tiara and the roses, which the school would be grateful for, since the activities budget had been cut again.

I read it standing at the mailbox at the end of our lane. The beans were turning yellow on both sides of the gravel. I read it twice, and then I walked the quarter mile back to the house without feeling my feet.

Gene was in the shop with the combine head torn apart on the floor. He looked up when I came in.

“You look like somebody died,” he said.

I handed him the letter. He wiped his hands on a red rag and read it. Then he looked at me over his glasses.

“Well,” he said. “There it is.”

“There what is?”

“The thing you could give back.”

I was in charge of the reunion budget. Five hundred dollars, left over from dues and a bake sale and a check from a classmate who had done well in Minneapolis. I was in charge of the program, because I was the only one on the committee who could work the copier at the church.

Nobody had picked who would crown the queen. Nobody had needed to. The letter had come to me.

Connie’s Phone Call

Connie called me the first week of September. I knew her number when it rang. She still lived in town, in the little ranch house on Third Street she had bought after her second divorce.

“Marlys, it’s Connie. I heard about the homecoming thing from Judy at the bank.”

“Hi, Connie.”

“I suppose I’ll be doing the crowning,” she said. “Being the last one and all. I’ve still got the crown, you know. Well, the old one. The rhinestones are mostly gone.”

She laughed a little. It was not a mean laugh. It was a nervous one, and I had not heard her laugh nervously in fifty years.

“We haven’t decided yet,” I said.

“Who else would it be?” she said.

I did not answer, and she did not push. She said she would see me at the planning meeting and hung up. I sat with the phone in my lap for a long time.

I want to be fair to Connie here, because for a long time I was not. She was not a monster. She was a girl whose mother left, whose father drank, who had to make her own supper most nights at fourteen. She was beautiful and she was popular and she was more alone than anybody in that school.

And she had taken something that was not hers, and so had I, in a way. Because I let her.

The Phone Call I Didn’t Make

I could have called Darlene. That was the obvious thing, and I thought about it every day that September.

She would say, “Oh, Marlys, that’s so long ago.” She would be kind about it. She would tell me it did not matter. And then she would hang up and stand in her kitchen and feel something she had never asked to feel, alone, with nobody to hand it to.

A phone call cannot hand anybody a crown.

But a halftime could. In front of the whole class and the whole town, with the band playing, the way it should have been the first time.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew it could not be a surprise to Connie. That was the one thing I was sure of. Whatever I did, I was not going to do to Connie what had been done to Darlene. I was not going to let her find out on a track with the lights on her.