The Graduation Party in the Fire Hall

He mailed the card home, to his own house, with a note to Rhonda on the outside of it.

Rhonda, it said. Please get this to Brooke for her party. I don’t have Angie’s new address with me. Love, Ken.

Rhonda got it. She opened it, read the note, and did exactly what she told Brooke she did.

She put the six hundred dollars back in its envelope, wrote Brooke’s name on it, and tucked it in her dresser drawer under her good scarves.

People ask me that too. Why didn’t you just call your father? One phone call and it would have been over.

They’re right. One phone call and it would have been over.

And I thought about making it the whole night after that call, lying on top of the covers in my scrubs, listening to the hardware store’s ice machine hum through the floor.

But it was six hundred dollars between my father and his wife. They had been married eleven years.

He had just had a piece of metal threaded into the artery of his heart, and the cardiologist had told him to keep his stress down, and he was seventy, and he loved her.

I was not going to put a seventy-year-old man with a fresh stent in the middle of his own marriage over six hundred dollars.

I would rather work. Work, I know how to do.

I’m a CNA at the care center on the edge of town. I’ve been one for nineteen years.

I know how to turn a two-hundred-pound man without hurting my back, and I know how to pick up a double.

The next morning I went in early and wrote my name on four open doubles on the schedule board in the break room.

Sixteen hours each, two weeks, time and a half after forty. Kim, the scheduler, looked at the board and then looked at me.

“Angie, you’re going to fall over,” she said.

“Not before the twenty-fourth,” I told her. “After that I’ll fall over all you want.”

I want you to understand who my daughter is, because Rhonda had made her into a grade on a report card, and she is so much more than that.

Brooke Schaaf graduated with a 2.4. She had a hard time with math from the third grade on, and nobody tested her for anything until her sophomore year, when a young teacher named Mrs. Haugen finally noticed she read every problem three times.

She started at the Dairy Queen out on the highway when she was fifteen, the week they would let her.

By sixteen she was closing. By seventeen she was training the new kids, and the manager, Tom, called her his right arm.

She paid for her own car, a 2011 Malibu with a rust spot over the back wheel. She paid her own phone bill.

She bought her own prom dress at the resale shop in Marshfield and took it in herself with my mother’s old sewing machine.

When my mother was dying, the winter Brooke was twelve, Brooke sat with her every day after school at the care center.