The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away

That night at the kitchen table I laid the January photo beside the one I had taken Friday of the new sheet, and I wrote the names in two columns. By eleven o’clock I could see it. Besides Maddie, five names had moved down. Jenny Baker had been fourth and was now sixth. Cole Anders had been sixth and was now eighth. And above them, one name had moved up from second to first, and that was the name at the top.

Every one of the five had taken the same dual-credit composition class Maddie had. Tanner had not.

I wrote the five names on a card. Six families, counting ours.

On Thursday afternoon Teresa Jensen, who teaches the composition class for the community college, emailed Ms. Larkin the posting dates, and Ms. Larkin forwarded them to me without a word of her own. It was just the college’s record and a line: Grades posted Dec. 20 and June 4. No incomplete.

On Saturday morning Bryan drove me in the county truck, because the lanes were wet and he did not trust the Buick on the Anders road. We sat at five kitchen tables between eight and two.

I do not have a speech for a stranger’s kitchen. What I have is a legal pad and a pen and a face people have seen across the Co-op counter for nineteen years, and it turns out that goes a long way. I said my name at every door, as if they did not know it, and I said what I wanted in two sentences, and then I stopped talking and let them read.

Mostly I got quiet. Jenny Baker’s mother, Jen, listened to my whole page standing at her counter. When I got to the change log she put her cup down and said, “My daughter has a nursing scholarship that cuts off at the top five. She told me Friday she’d been bumped to sixth and that it was probably her own fault.”

“It wasn’t.”

“She’s been apologizing to me all weekend,” Jen said, and she went and got her daughter out of the barn.

At the Andersses’ the boy stood with his hands in his back pockets and said, “I knew it was weird, but I figured it was me.” At the fifth house a grandmother raising a granddaughter said, “I don’t want any trouble,” and then asked me where she could sign.

At the third house the father had been in the field since four, and he stood on his porch in his sock feet and read my page twice with a cold cup of coffee in his hand. When he finished he said only, “Write down which day you need it by,” and he went in and found his reading glasses and a pen.

Not one of them asked about a lawyer. Every one of them asked what I needed them to do.