The Gumball Ring at the Bursar’s Window

Patrice Jorgensen slid the laptop back across her kitchen table without looking at the screen. She did it slowly, the way you push away a plate you are done with, and then she folded her hands on top of the stack of mail.

“No,” she said. “I’m not putting my name on another year of this, Emma.”

Emma had the financial aid form open to the page that needed her mother. All it asked for was a login, a few numbers off a tax return, and a signature. It would have taken fifteen minutes.

“Mom, it’s not a loan,” Emma said quietly. “Your name doesn’t go on anything you owe. It just tells them what you make, so they know what I get.”

“I know what it does.” Patrice picked up her coffee, which had gone cold an hour before, and drank it anyway. “It keeps you over there playing nurse while your brothers eat cereal for supper.”

I was sitting at the end of the table, the guest chair with the wobbly leg, and I kept my mouth shut. It was October. I had known Patrice for a year and a half, and I had learned that she did not like a man in her kitchen telling her anything.

From the living room we could hear the television and the two boys arguing over the remote. Owen was nine and Sam was six. Sam had a cough that had been hanging on for two weeks.

“You want to help people?” Patrice said. “Start with the two in the next room.”

Emma closed the laptop. She did not cry, not there. She stood up, rinsed her mother’s cup in the sink, set it upside down in the rack, and went to find her brothers to say goodbye.

That was the first time Patrice said no. She would say it again in November, and at Christmas, and in January, and twice in February. Five months of no, said every way a tired woman can say it.

How we got there

My name is Caleb Fritz. I was twenty-two that fall, in my second year as a welder’s apprentice at a fabrication shop on the east side of Sedalia, Missouri. We built trailer frames, feed bunks, gates, and anything else a farmer could draw on a napkin and bring in.

Emma Jorgensen was twenty-one. I met her at a Casey’s at six in the morning, both of us in line for breakfast pizza, both of us with the same burned look of people who had been up too early. She had on scrubs and a lanyard and she was reading flash cards in line.

“Cranial nerves,” she said, when she caught me looking. “Twelve of them. I’ve got four down.”

“I can’t name one,” I said.

“Olfactory,” she said, and handed me the card. “Now you can name one.”

That was the whole start of it. I still have the card. It is in the glovebox of my truck, soft as a dollar bill from being handled.

Emma was in the second year of the hospital’s nursing program in Sedalia. The hospital ran its own school, but the classes were held on the community college campus, and the college business office did all of the billing for it.

It was not a cheap program. A year of tuition, fees, lab kits, clinical uniforms and the testing package came to a little over fourteen thousand dollars, which is more than the regular two-year courses cost, and less than a four-year school.