The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

The answer is simple. I did not want his money anymore. I wanted a seat in a classroom.

I filled out the federal student aid form at my own kitchen table that same night, after Dylan went to bed.

It took me an hour and forty minutes, because I had to dig my tax return out of the shoebox in the closet.

I had made thirty-one thousand dollars the year before, with overtime. Dylan was still my dependent.

When the numbers came back, the federal grant and the state grant together covered my tuition with a little left over for books.

I sat there and looked at that screen until the clock on the stove said 2:14. I had been telling myself for eighteen years that college was for other people.

It turned out college was for anybody who could fill out a form at two in the morning.

The next Monday, I called the community college.

It is thirty miles west of us, in the next county, a long brick building set back from the highway with a parking lot that holds more cars than our whole town.

A woman named Mrs. Pruitt in the advising office answered. She had a voice like a church secretary, warm and a little tired.

I told her I wanted to be a nurse and I did not know where to start.

“Well, honey, you start with prerequisites,” she said.

“The nursing program has a waiting list and a test. You need anatomy and physiology, English, psychology and a math. Get those done with good grades, and you apply in the spring.”

“I work full time,” I said. “I’m a nurse aide. I’ve been one since I was nineteen.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Then you already know more than half the people who walk in here wanting to be nurses. Let’s build you a schedule.”

We built it on the phone. Anatomy and Physiology One with a lab, four hours. English Composition, three.

General Psychology, three. Medical Terminology, two. Twelve hours. Monday through Thursday, eight in the morning until a little after noon.

I hung up and called my director of nursing, a woman named Deb who had hired me as a skinny nineteen-year-old with a baby on my hip.

I asked if I could move from days to second shift, two-thirty to eleven, plus every other weekend.

“Tonya Wilkes,” she said. “Are you going to nursing school on me?”

“I’m going to try,” I said.

“Then you can have second shift,” Deb said.

“And when you finish, you come back here and work for me. I’m not training you sixteen years for some hospital in Evansville to get you.”

I did not tell Daddy. I want to be honest about that, too. It was not a plan or a trick.

I just did not want to sit at that kitchen table and watch him decide whether it was a good idea.

I did tell Dylan. I told him on a Sunday night while he was eating cereal over the sink, and I was braced for him to be embarrassed.

I was going to the same college as him, in the same buildings, on the same days.

He stood there with the spoon in his mouth for a long time. Then he took it out and said, “What days?”

“Monday through Thursday. Eight to about twelve-thirty.”

“I’m eight to one,” he said. “Tuesday I get out at eleven, but I can sit in the library.”