The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

I was lonely. That is not an excuse. It is just the truth.

I met a boy named Chris at a ball game in Mount Vernon, and by the week before Christmas my senior year, I was throwing up in the girls’ bathroom before second period.

Chris’s folks moved to Indiana that summer. He sent two letters and then he stopped.

I do not hold it against him much anymore. He was seventeen, too, and his daddy was a harder man than mine.

When I told my father, he was sitting at that same kitchen table. He did not yell. Daddy has never yelled in his life.

He just looked at me for a long time and then looked out the window at the road.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve made your bed.”

That was all. He got up, got his cap off the hook, and went back to the elevator, even though it was after seven at night and there was nothing out there to do.

He never mentioned the green passbook again. Not when I finished my senior year with a seven-month belly under my gown.

Not when I started at Maple Grove at nineteen. Not when Dylan started kindergarten, or Little League, or high school.

I did not ask about it. I figured he had closed it out, or moved it into something for himself. It was his money.

He was the one who had put it there, five and ten dollars at a time, out of a grain elevator manager’s paycheck.

The night he told me about the tuition, I drove us home in my old silver pickup.

It was a 1997 Chevy with two hundred and twelve thousand miles on it and a tailgate that only opened from the outside.

Dylan sat in the passenger seat with his hands between his knees. He had just turned eighteen that summer.

He had graduated in May, with a buzz cut he gave himself in the bathroom with Shawn’s old clippers the week before.

We were halfway home on Route 14 before he said anything.

The fields on both sides were going brown at the edges, the way they do in August, and the sun was a red ball over the tree line.

“I’ll give it back,” he said. “I’ll tell him I don’t want it. I can work a year and pay my own way. Mom, I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know whose it was.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “You’re not giving anything back. You’re going to school. That money is doing what it was put there to do.”

“It was put there for you.”

“It was put there for school,” I said. “That’s what he said, and he’s right about that much. You’re going. That’s the end of it.”

He looked out the window for a while. Then he said, very quietly, “That’s not fair, what he did.”

I have thought about how I answered him many times since. I could have said a hundred things about his grandfather.

I knew every one of them by heart. I had been saying them to myself for eighteen years.

“Fair’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. “It was his money to spend. I quit wanting anything from him a long time ago.”

People have asked me since why I did not fight Daddy on it. Why I did not call my brothers, or tell him what I thought, or at least make him say it was wrong.