The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

Daddy told me at his kitchen table the first week of August, with the supper dishes still in the sink and the window unit rattling like it had a loose bolt somewhere inside it.

“I paid Dylan’s tuition this morning,” he said. “Fall and spring both. Books too. I went by the college and wrote the check myself.”

I had a dish towel in my hands.

I remember that, because I folded it in half and then in half again, and I set it on the counter very carefully, like it might break.

“That was good of you, Daddy,” I said. “Dylan will be grateful. Where did the money come from?”

He took his reading glasses off and laid them on top of the Hamilton County paper. He did not look at me.

He looked at the salt shaker, which was the same rooster salt shaker Mama bought at a yard sale in 1991.

“The account I opened when you were born,” he said. “Down at the bank. It was always for school. Now it’s going to school. I figured that settles it.”

He said it the way he used to read off the moisture numbers on a load of beans at the elevator.

Flat, final, nothing left to talk about. A number on a ticket. Next truck.

Dylan was out on the porch swing with his phone. The screen door was open. I knew from the way the swing stopped creaking that he had heard every word of it.

I want to tell this honestly, so I will tell you what I did next. I did nothing.

I picked the towel back up, finished drying the casserole dish, and put it in the cabinet above the stove where it belonged.

I was thirty-five years old. I had been a nurse aide at Maple Grove Care Center for sixteen years.

I had turned more old men in their beds than my father had turned trucks at the elevator, and I had never once cried in front of him.

I did not start that night.

The account was real. I had known about it since I was twelve.

Daddy showed me the passbook once, on a Saturday when we went to the bank to cash his check, a little green book with my name typed on the inside cover.

“That’s your college,” he said then. “Your brothers each had one. You put a little in, it grows. By the time you’re eighteen, you’ll have enough for a good start.”

Darrell had gone to Carbondale and studied agriculture. Kurt went to Carbondale for electrical engineering technology. Shawn went to Carbondale for business.

Daddy paid every semester and drove every one of them down with a pickup full of boxes.

I was the youngest and the only girl.

Mama used to say I was the one who would go farthest, because I read everything I could reach, including the backs of the feed sacks in the barn.

Mama died when I was fourteen. Pancreatic cancer.

Eleven weeks from the day the doctor in Evansville said the word until the day we buried her at the cemetery outside McLeansboro, in the plot Daddy picked because it faced the road.

After that it was Daddy and me in that house. My brothers were grown and gone.

Daddy went to the elevator before daylight and came home after dark, and in harvest season I sometimes did not see him awake for a week.