The Loan Papers I Signed Alone
“College is a scam, Abby.” Jeff said it with his fork still in his hand, halfway between his plate and his mouth, like it was a remark about the weather and not about our daughter’s whole life.
It was the first week of August, and we were eating supper at the kitchen table with the windows open.
You could hear the corn rustling past the grove and a combine somebody was testing two sections over.
Abby had her financial aid papers in a manila folder beside her plate.
She had been carrying that folder around the house for three weeks, the way some girls carry a phone. She had tabs on it.
She had a highlighter clipped to the front.
She was eighteen. She had graduated in May, fourth in a class of forty-one, and she had been accepted into the nursing program at the state university an hour east of our place. She wanted to work labor and delivery.
“It’s not a scam, Dad,” she said quietly. “It’s a nursing degree. You can’t be a nurse without one.”
“You can be an aide,” Jeff said. “You can do the CNA course at the tech college for a few hundred dollars and be working by Christmas. No debt. No interest. No bank owning you for twenty years.”
I watched Abby’s face when he said that. She did not argue.
She just set the folder flat on the table and smoothed the front of it with her palm, the way my mother used to smooth a tablecloth before company.
I should tell you who we are, so you understand that table. My name is Kristin Fischer.
I am forty-four years old, and I have worked the teller window at the bank in town for nineteen years.
Jeff is forty-six. He sells crop insurance out of a little office on Main Street, between the café and the hardware store.
He knows every farmer in three counties by first name and by what they planted last year.
We live on a farm place about four miles out of town in southwest Minnesota. We do not farm it ourselves anymore.
Jeff rents the cropland to the neighbor, and we keep the yard, the grove, the old barn, and a machine shed full of things Jeff fixes on weekends.
Abby is our only child. She grew up showing sheep in 4-H, and Jeff was the one who stood beside her in the show ring every August at the county fair, holding the halter while she waited for the judge.
That is why what he said at supper landed the way it did. He had been her biggest fan in every barn in the county.
And now he was telling her that the thing she wanted most was a con.
“I’m not saying don’t go,” Jeff said, softer. “I’m saying I’m not signing for it. You want to go, you go on what you’ve got.”
“I don’t have enough on what I’ve got,” Abby said. “That’s why I asked.”
“Then you wait a year and save,” he said. “That’s how my dad did it. That’s how everybody did it before these schools got their hooks in everybody.”
He finished his potatoes. He told me supper was good. He went out to the shop to work on the mower deck, and the screen door clapped shut behind him the way it had ten thousand times.
Abby sat there with the folder. I sat across from her. For a long minute neither of us said a word, and the only sound was the clock over the stove and the corn outside.