Twelve Chairs and a Desk
What Sierra said
Sierra froze. She was holding the books against her chest like a shield, and I could see the top one now.
It was a thick blue textbook, fundamentals of nursing, the kind with a hundred colored tabs sticking out the side.
“How did you know?” Sierra whispered.
Patti smiled, the way she smiles at frightened people, which I have seen her do at funerals and at the bedside of her own mother.
“Because I know that drug guide,” she said. “I had the very same one. Mine had a coffee ring on the cover.”
Then Patti nodded at the stack of index cards. “And because only a nursing student studies with rubber-banded flash cards at one in the morning,” she said. “I saw your light when I drove by Tuesday night. I wondered.”
Tyler had come in behind Sierra. He was standing in the doorway now, too. “Nursing school?” he said. “Sierra. What are you talking about? You said that was work stuff. You said it was a training thing for the store.”
Sierra started to cry. Not loud. She just stood there in the corner of that gray room with her books in her arms, and the tears ran down, and she did not wipe them because her hands were full.
“Nobody knows,” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t want anybody to know until I passed. If I don’t pass, then nobody has to know I tried again. I can’t have people watching me fail. Not again.”
Nobody at the table moved. Then Lois Kerr, who is seventy-four and has buried a husband and a son, pushed her chair back and said, “Well, come sit down and tell us about it, sweetheart. Your arms must be tired.”
Sierra looked at me. I will never forget that look. She was asking me if she was allowed.
In my own house, in a room she had painted with her own money, she was asking me if she was allowed to sit down.
I went and got a plate from the kitchen. I came back and set it at the table between Lois and Patti, where I usually sit, and I pulled out my own chair for her.
Mark brought in a kitchen chair for me without a word and set it at the corner.
Four houses
Sierra sat down. She set her books on the floor by her feet.
Patti spooned chicken and noodles onto her plate, a lot of it, the way you feed somebody you have decided to take care of. Marcy passed her the deviled eggs.
And then, a little at a time, with twelve women not saying a word, Sierra told us.
She grew up in four foster homes between the ages of nine and eighteen, in three different counties. She aged out the week of her eighteenth birthday.
“I never had a room,” she said, looking at her plate. “Not once. I always slept in somebody else’s room. Somebody’s sister’s room, or a back porch they closed in, or a room with somebody else’s trophies on the shelf.”
“One house had a sewing room,” she said, and laughed a little, wet. “I wasn’t allowed to go in it. The lady kept it locked. I used to sit outside the door and listen to the machine.”
She had started nursing school once before, at twenty, at a community college.
Then her car died, and she could not get to her classes, and she lost her apartment, and then she lost her place in the program. She had never told Tyler.
This time she had saved for a year. She had a Pell grant and the education voucher the state gives kids who aged out of foster care, up until they turn twenty-six. She had two years left on it. This was her shot.
The classes were online at night, she said, with labs on Saturdays in Marion.
Her clinical rotation would start in April at the nursing home in Mount Gilead. She could not study in Tyler’s room. She could not study at the store.
“I needed a door that closed,” she said. “And I just wanted one room that wasn’t somebody else’s. I know it was yours. I know that. I painted it gray because every room I ever slept in was somebody else’s color, and I wanted one that was mine.”
She finally looked up at me. “I shouldn’t have told Patti that. I shouldn’t have touched your machine. I panicked. I thought if twelve women were in that room they’d see my books and ask, and I’d have to say, and then I’d fail and everybody would know.”