The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away
“Then what are you going to do?”
I did not have the whole answer yet. I had the first piece. “I’m going to ask for paper,” I said.
She almost laughed. It came out of her like a hiccup, and then she put her face against my shoulder, cap and all, and the tassel hit me in the eye.
I should tell you why we did not simply do the obvious things.
The obvious thing was to phone the board president and tell him what his son’s school had done. The president of the Marlow school board is Greg Hale. Tanner’s father. Greg farms eleven hundred acres south of town, sits in the center chair on the third Monday of every month, and plays golf on Thursdays with Dr. Cantrell. The handbook sends a rank dispute to the board. I would have been appealing to the one man in the county who could least afford to hear me.
The other obvious thing was to storm in. Bryan wanted to.
My husband is fifty and runs the county grader, and that Friday he was on gravel eleven miles out when I called him. I told him in about ninety seconds. He said nothing for a while. Then he said, “I’m going to that man’s house.”
“You are not. If you walk into Curt Cantrell’s front yard with that look on your face, I will spend the next month hearing about a parent incident, and our daughter will be that incident. Let me do it my way. I need you for something else.”
“What.”
“A week from tomorrow I’m going to need a driver. Some of those people live on roads I’d put the Buick in the ditch on.”
I heard the grader’s blade drop, that long scrape and chatter. “I’ll be home by five,” he said. That is Bryan. He does not talk about what he feels. He takes the job you hand him and does it all the way to the end of the road.
That night Maddie did not eat supper. I heard her hang the gown on her bedroom door and smooth the gold cord flat. Then through the door I heard her say, quietly, “I’m okay, Mom,” and she was not talking to me. She was saying it to the empty room, the way you say a thing to make it come true.
Four years she had given that school. She rode the 6:10 bus every morning from our road, thirty-eight minutes each way, with her homework on her knees. She took College Composition at the community college her junior year, fall and spring, and worked Saturdays at the feed store on top of it. She had never gotten anything below an A-minus. She had wanted one thing from high school that she did not get from her own effort, and that was for somebody to tell her, in a gym, in front of her grandmother, that it had counted.