The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

Mr. Larson

First I went to see Mr. Larson. He was young for a principal, maybe forty, with a little boy’s haircut and a tie with footballs on it. He had a picture of his wife and twin daughters on the corner of his desk.

I put the yearbook on his desk and opened it to the back cover. I unfolded the green ledger sheet and smoothed it flat.

“What am I looking at?” he asked.

I told him. He listened the way young people listen to old people when they are trying to be polite, and then somewhere in the middle he stopped being polite and started listening.

“Does anybody else know?” he said.

“My husband. And Connie, of course. And Rodney, but Rodney died in 2009.”

He set the sheet down very carefully.

“Mrs. Hagen,” he said, “the letter says the class picks who does the crowning. I meant that. I’m not going to tell your class who to choose.”

“I’m not asking you to,” I said. “I’m asking if it’s all right to put it in the program. Who’s doing the crowning. And why.”

He thought about that. He tapped his pen on the desk blotter.

“Put the name in the program,” he said finally. “Leave the why for the microphone. If you put the why in print, it’s an accusation. If you say it out loud, standing next to the person, it’s something else.”

The Kitchen Table

I went to Connie’s house on a Tuesday afternoon in late September. I brought a pan of rhubarb bars, because I did not know how else to walk into someone’s house to tell them that.

Her kitchen was small and very clean. There was a cross-stitch on the wall that said “Bless This Mess,” and nothing in the room was a mess. She had a cat, a big orange one, asleep in a laundry basket by the furnace register.

She made coffee. We sat at her table. She looked at the bars and then at me.

“You don’t bring rhubarb bars for nothing,” she said.

I took the tally sheet out of my purse and put it on the table between us. I did not unfold it. I did not have to.

She did not touch it. She looked at it for a long time, the green paper, the faded crease down the middle.

“You kept it,” she said.

“I kept it.”

“Fifty years.”

“Fifty years.”

She got up and poured herself more coffee, though her cup was still half full. She stood at the counter with her back to me.

“My dad was drunk the night of that game,” she said quietly. “Did you know that? He didn’t come. He was at the Legion. Rodney drove me home after the dance and the porch light was off, and Dad was asleep in his chair with the television on the test pattern.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I sat on the edge of my bed with that crown on until two in the morning,” she said. “That crown was the only thing I had that was mine. The only thing anybody ever gave me.”

“It wasn’t yours, Connie,” I said. Not loud. Just plain.

She turned around. Her eyes were wet, but her face did not move.

“I know it wasn’t,” she said. “I have always known it wasn’t.”

She did not argue with me. That was what surprised me the most. In fifty years of thinking about this moment, I had always pictured Connie arguing. She did not argue.

“I’m going to give Darlene the crown,” I said. “At halftime. With the class standing there. I’m not going to say your name or what you did. I’m going to tell the truth about what the count was, and I’m going to tell the truth about me.”

“About you.”

“I was there too. I folded it up and put it in my bag. I’m not standing up there pretending I’m the hero, Connie. I’m the girl who kept her mouth shut.”

She sat back down slowly.

“You can stand on the track with the class,” I said, “or you can stay home. Nobody will say anything about it either way. I’ll make sure of that.”

She looked at the tally sheet. She still had not touched it.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.