The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

Friday came and went. At five o’clock the tour company released her spot to a boy named Tyler on the waiting list.

Mrs. Hollis called me herself to tell me, and she sounded like she had been crying a little, which I had never heard from her in my life.

I did not scream at Kevin. I did not throw his clothes on the lawn or call his mother or post anything online.

I have seen women in my chair do those things, and I have seen how it goes for them after.

For a few weeks, I just watched him. He tried to apologize to me about every other night.

He would come up behind me at the sink, or sit on the edge of the bed, and say he was sorry, he had been scared, he would make it right.

“I’m not the one you owe it to,” I told him every time. “You took it from her. You said what you said in front of her. Whatever you’re sorry about, you can say it to her.”

He did not. He would get close and then lose his nerve. Avery stopped eating supper at the table and took her plate to her room.

Kevin pretended not to notice, and I pretended to believe that he did not notice.

Then one night in March, I was cleaning out the junk drawer looking for a rubber band, and I found the fall letter from Mrs. Hollis.

The one she sends every parent with the full schedule for the trip, day by day, hour by hour, so we know where our kids are.

Sunday, June 7, depart the school at six in the morning on the charter bus, overnight in Ohio. Monday, June 8, arrive in Washington by afternoon. Tuesday, June 9, eight o’clock, Lincoln Memorial and the class photograph on the steps.

I read it standing at the drawer with a rubber band in my hand. And then I read it again.

The Lincoln Memorial is not a ticketed place. It does not close. Anybody in the whole country can walk up those steps at eight in the morning on a Tuesday.

You do not need a tour company or a charter bus or a permission slip.

You just need a car, and a week, and a mother who is done waiting for somebody else to fix it.

I did not tell Avery right away. I did not want to promise her something and then have the transmission go out.

I sat at the kitchen table after she went to bed and worked it out on the back of a client card.

From our place outside Storm Lake to Washington is about eleven hundred and thirty miles. Sixteen hours of driving if you do not stop much, which you always do.

Our car gets about thirty on the highway. With gas where it was that spring, I figured four hundred dollars round trip, more or less.

A motel out in Virginia near a train station would run about ninety dollars a night if I did not mind the kind of place where the ice machine does not work.

Four nights. The museums on the Mall are free. The memorials are free. Food, if we bought bread and peanut butter and ate one real supper a day, maybe two hundred.

All told, a little over a thousand dollars. I had seven hundred and eighty in the envelope.

I had three months of summer weddings and graduation updos coming. I put every tip into that envelope from March on and did not touch it.