The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

He rinsed out his bowl. “We’ll take your truck. My car burns oil, and it’s thirty miles.”

That was all he said about it. He went to bed.

I sat on the couch and cried for the first time in a long time, quietly, so he would not hear me through the wall.

The first morning of classes was the third Monday in August.

I got up at five-thirty, showered, and put on my navy scrubs, because I was going straight to Maple Grove from campus and there was no time to change.

I pulled my hair back in a ponytail the way I had worn it at work for sixteen years.

I put on the green fleece vest my brother Kurt’s wife, Dawn, gave me two Christmases ago, because the classrooms ran cold and so did Maple Grove.

When I came out to the truck at ten till seven, Dylan was already sitting in the passenger seat in his gray hooded sweatshirt with his eyes half closed.

And on the dash, right in front of the steering wheel, there was a brown paper sack, folded down twice at the top, with “Mom” written on it in black marker.

I opened it. A turkey sandwich on wheat bread, cut corner to corner the way I used to cut his.

An apple. Two of the peanut butter cookies from the jar, wrapped in a paper towel.

“What’s this?”

“Lunch,” he said, without opening his eyes. “You’ll forget to eat. You always forget to eat. You come home from Maple Grove and you’ve had a Pepsi and a pack of crackers.”

I did not say anything. I could not have said anything.

I put the sack on the seat between us, backed out of the driveway, and drove the thirty miles with my eyes stinging the whole way.

We pulled into the student lot at seven-forty.

The sun was still low, coming in flat and gold across the asphalt, and there were only a few other students out, far off by the other end of the building.

We parked at the back, because I did not know any better yet.

We got out with our backpacks, his black, mine a gray one from the Dollar General, and we walked side by side toward the long brick building.

Nobody looked twice at us. I had been afraid they would. I had pictured some nineteen-year-old girl elbowing her friend and laughing at the old lady in scrubs. It did not happen.

Halfway across the lot, Dylan bumped my shoulder with his. “You’re walking like you’re going to the dentist,” he said.

“I feel like I’m going to the dentist.”

“It’s just school, Mom. You sit down and they talk.”

He split off toward the math building at the corner.

I watched him go, his backpack hanging off one shoulder the way all of them carry them, and then I went inside and found room 114 by myself.

There were twenty-six of us in Anatomy and Physiology. I counted. Eleven of us had kids.

One woman, a mail carrier named Shelly, had a grandson. I was not the oldest person in the room. I was not even close.

The instructor was a retired respiratory therapist named Mr. Hale who had spent thirty years at the hospital in Mount Vernon.

He held up a skull on the first day and said, “Everything you will ever do as a nurse starts with knowing what’s under the skin.”