The Check at the Graduation Party

Not that Tyler deserved it, not that Abby didn’t, just that once, fifteen years ago, a fifty dollar bill had gone into that account with Greg’s fingerprints on it.

So what if I gave it back?

Not angrily. Not to embarrass anybody. Just to take the one leg away, so there was nothing left to stand on, and nothing left for my daughter to hear through her bedroom door.

That weekend I drove to the credit union and asked the girl at the counter, a sweet young woman who had gone to school with Abby’s cousin, if she could print me the interest the account had earned each year since it opened.

She gave me four pages. Some years the rate was almost nothing. A couple of years lately it had been better.

I sat in my car in the parking lot with a calculator from my glove box and worked it out on the back of an envelope.

Fifty dollars, deposited fifteen years ago, growing at what that account had actually paid over those years.

It came to a hair over one and a third percent a year, averaged out. I ran it three times to be sure.

Sixty-one dollars and eighteen cents.

I laughed out loud in that parking lot, all by myself. Sixty-one eighteen. That was the number that had been keeping my daughter up at night.

I didn’t tell anybody what I was planning. Not my mother, not my sister, not Abby.

I think I was half afraid that if I said it out loud, somebody would talk me out of it, and half afraid that nobody would.

Abby graduated on the last Sunday in May. The ceremony was at the high school stadium at one o’clock, and it was one of those Ohio spring days that can’t believe its own luck, seventy-four degrees and a breeze coming across the soybean fields east of town.

Greg was there, three rows behind me in the bleachers, with Kristen and Tyler.

When they called Abigail Marie Novak, he whistled through his fingers the way his father used to at the county fair tractor pull, and I heard Tyler laugh.

Then we all drove back to my house for the party.

If you have never been to a graduation open house in northwest Ohio, I’m not sure I can explain it. Every family on the block throws one the same two weekends.

People go to four in an afternoon. You eat pulled pork at three of them and feel bad about the fourth.

I had rented a white tent from the party rental place out on Main Street for a hundred and forty dollars, and the two young men who set it up on Saturday morning staked it into my backyard like they expected a tornado. I didn’t argue. It’s Ohio.