The Janitor Who Came to My Graduation

“Three hundred dollars, Maci. Do you know what three hundred dollars is to me right now?”

My mother said it without looking up. She was at the kitchen table folding my little brother’s baseball pants, the white ones with the grass stains that never come all the way out.

It was the first Sunday of January, and I was leaving for the Army in the morning. A recruiter was picking me up at six to drive me to the processing station in Kansas City.

“It’s gas and one night at a motel,” I said. “That’s all. Graduation is the third Thursday in March. I already looked it up.”

“I know when it is.”

“Then you know I want you there.”

She folded another pair of pants, pressed the crease flat with the side of her hand, and set them on the stack. She still did not look at me.

“I told you how I feel about the Army,” she said. “I told you in May, and I told you at Thanksgiving, and I’m not going to pretend I feel different now.”

“You don’t have to feel different. You just have to come.”

On the refrigerator behind her was a schedule held up by a magnet shaped like an ear of corn. It was Brecken’s spring break tournament. Oklahoma City, four days, the same weekend as my graduation. I had already done the math on that one too.

The team fee was six hundred and fifty dollars, paid in January. Then three nights at the hotel the team had blocked, gas down and back, and food for a growing boy at ballpark prices.

Close to eighteen hundred dollars, all told. My mother had been setting it aside since Christmas. I knew because I had seen the envelope in the kitchen drawer with “Oklahoma City” written on it in her handwriting.

“The tournament’s paid for,” she said, like she could hear me thinking. “It’s been paid since before you ever had a graduation date. Your brother needs me there. He’s fifteen.”

“I’m nineteen in February,” I said. “I’m not asking you to need me. I’m asking you to watch me walk across a field.”

She stopped folding. For one second I thought she was going to cry, or yell, or say yes. She did none of those. She picked up the next pair of pants.

“Go to bed, Maci,” she said. “You have to be up early.”

I went to bed. I did not sleep much.

Our House on Locust Street

I should tell you about my mother, because she is not a bad woman, and I do not want anyone thinking she is.

Sheree Dorrance has worked the early shift as a nurse’s aide at the nursing home in Hiawatha, Kansas, for eleven years. She leaves the house at five fifteen in the morning. She has lifted more grown people out of bed than most men lift hay bales.

My dad was a scale operator at the grain elevator on the edge of town. When I was twelve, he had a heart attack in the scale house during fall harvest. He was forty-one years old.

The ambulance came from the hospital, which is not far, but it was harvest and the line of trucks was backed up on the road. By the time they got to him, there was nothing left to do.

After that it was just the three of us. My mother, me, and Brecken, who was eight and had just started kid pitch baseball that spring. Dad had coached his first team.

I think that is part of why the baseball mattered so much to her. Every game Brecken played was a game Dad would have been standing at the fence for. She stood at the fence in his place.

I understood that, even then. I still understand it.

What I did not understand was what happened to me in all of it. I was twelve and quiet and good at school, so everybody figured I was fine. Mostly I was. I just learned to take care of myself early.