The Diploma I Earned at 64

Kenzie

The third week, Mrs. Lindquist put us in pairs for a project.

You had to keep the books for a made-up small business for a month, every sale and every bill, and then build the statements at the end.

She went down the rows pairing people up. When she got to me she looked at the girl next to me, a skinny thing with a long brown braid and a hooded sweatshirt from a high school two counties over, and she said, “You two.”

The girl’s name was Kenzie. She was nineteen. She worked nights at a nursing home as an aide and came to class straight from her shift, which is why she kept a gas station energy drink on her desk and sometimes fell asleep with her pencil still moving.

The first thing she said to me was, “Do you know how to use the spreadsheet program?”

And the first thing I said to her was, “I know how to use a ten-key adding machine without looking.” She laughed, and it was a nice laugh, nothing like Eric’s.

She taught me the spreadsheet program. It took her about three weeks and a great deal of patience.

I would put a number in the wrong cell and the whole column would turn into little pound signs, and she would lean over and fix it without making me feel stupid.

In return I brought her pan bars every Thursday. Scotcheroos, mostly, and lemon bars when the lemons were cheap.

She said nobody had made her anything since her grandma died. She ate them in the hallway before class, standing up, like a farmhand at noon.

She called me Linda. Not Mrs. Halvorson, not ma’am. Just Linda, as if we were the same age and had known each other for years.

I had not been just Linda to anybody but Ray in a long time. I liked it more than I can tell you.

Our made-up business was a bait shop. We named it Kenzie and Linda’s Live Bait and Tackle, and we gave it a cooler that broke down in July so we had a repair expense to record.

We got the highest grade in the class. Mrs. Lindquist wrote “Excellent teamwork” across the top.