The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

I wrote that down. I still have it, on the first page of a spiral notebook that cost forty-nine cents.

The fall went the way a hard thing goes when you decide to do it anyway. Some days were good.

Most days were just long. A few of them were the worst days I had had since I was seventeen.

My alarm went off at five-thirty. Class from eight to noon or so. Thirty miles to Maple Grove.

Clock in at two-thirty. Off at eleven. Home by eleven-forty. Study until one. Do it again.

Every other weekend I worked doubles. On the weekends I was off, I sat at the kitchen table with my anatomy book and Dylan sat across from me with his college algebra and neither one of us talked for hours.

And every single morning, there was a brown paper sack on the dash. He never missed one. Not when he had a test.

Not when he was up until two finishing an English paper. Not the morning he had a fever of a hundred and one and stayed home.

That morning, I went out to the truck at ten till seven, and the sack was on the dash, and he was back in bed with a box of tissues.

He had gotten up, made my sandwich, carried it out in his socks, and gone back to bed.

I kept every one of those paper sacks. I folded them flat and put them in the drawer of my nightstand. By December, there were sixty-one of them.

Dylan quizzed me in the truck. I drove and he held the flash cards.

By the middle of September he knew the bones of the hand as well as I did, because he had heard them every morning for a month.

“Carpals,” he’d say. “Go.”

“Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate.”

“There’s a song for it,” he said one morning. “A girl in my English class told me. Sally Left The Party To Take Cathy Home.”

“Dylan Wilkes.”

“I’m just telling you what she said. It works, though. You won’t forget it now.”

I have not forgotten it since. Mr. Hale smiled when I told him and said that one had been going around nursing schools since before I was born.

At Maple Grove, the residents found out I was in school within about a day, because nothing stays secret in a nursing home.

By the end of the first week, half of them were quizzing me.

Miss Opal Rendleman in room 12 was ninety-one and had been a country schoolteacher in Hamilton County for forty-four years.

She could not walk anymore, but there was not one thing wrong with her mind.

She had me bring my anatomy book to her room on my supper break.

She would put her glasses on, open it to a page, and cover the labels with a piece of cardboard she cut from the box her slippers came in.

“The femur, Tonya. Where does it attach?”

“The hip. The acetabulum. And the knee.”

“Spell acetabulum.”

I spelled it. She said I missed a letter. I had not.

She checked the book and said, “Well, I’ll be. I taught spelling for forty-four years and I never could spell that one.”

The week before midterms, she grabbed my wrist while I was turning her for the night. Her hand was all bone and paper, and stronger than you would think.