The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

The Crown

Ashlyn had been standing three feet away through all of it, in her blue gown and her sash, with her escort holding her elbow. She was crying too. Half the court was crying. The girls had mascara running down to their chins.

Darlene looked at her and wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “We’ve kept you waiting. You’ve been waiting all week for this.”

She looked down at the tiara in her hand. Then she held it out to me.

“Marlys, you put it on her,” she said. “My hands are no good right now. And I want to hold on to this.”

She meant the yearbook.

“Darlene, it’s yours to give.”

“Then I’m giving it,” she said. “To you, to give to her. You carried it fifty years. You can carry it three more feet.”

So I took the tiara. Ashlyn bent her head down, and all those bobby pins shone under the lights, and I set the crown on her red hair as gently as I have ever done anything in my life.

Darlene stood right beside us with the old yellowed yearbook open against her chest, still crying, and she said, “There. There she is.”

The announcer, bless him, found his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, your 2026 Homecoming Queen, Ashlyn,” he said, and said her last name, and the whole field stood up.

Vern

That is when I looked over at the fence.

Vern Pruitt was standing at the gate where Darlene had left him. He had his phone out. He was holding it up with both hands to take her picture, and his hands were shaking so badly from the Parkinson’s that the phone was going back and forth like a leaf in the wind.

He did not give up. He kept trying. He braced his elbow against the fence post and tried again.

Gene saw it too. My husband walked down the rail and stood behind Vern and put one big hand under Vern’s wrist to steady it. He did not take the phone. He did not say anything. He just held Vern’s wrist still so Vern could take his own wife’s picture.

I found out later that Vern took eleven pictures. Nine of them are blurry. Two of them are the best pictures anybody ever took of Darlene Pruitt, standing on a football track under the lights with a yearbook against her heart and a girl in a crown beside her.

She has one of them on her refrigerator now. Vern had it printed at the drugstore in Wade City the next week.

After

The second half started. We all went back up into the stands, slowly, the way old people go up bleachers. We lost the game by a touchdown. Nobody in our section noticed until it was over.

Connie did not go back to the end of our row. Darlene would not let her. Darlene sat in the middle of the reserved section with Vern on one side and Connie on the other, and she held the yearbook on her lap the whole second half.

After the game we went to the concession stand because Vern wanted a hot chocolate. The line was long. Kids kept coming up to Darlene. Girls from the volleyball team. A boy from the band with his trombone case. One little girl, maybe seven, tugged on Darlene’s coat and asked if she was a queen.

“I was,” Darlene said. “For about fifty years. I just found out tonight.”

The little girl thought about that very seriously.

“That’s a long time to not know,” she said.

“It is, honey,” Darlene said. “But I know now.”