The Semester I Rode to Class With My Son

“You know what I’d have given,” she said, “to have a daughter go back to school at your age? Your daddy ought to be bragging on you down at the Casey’s every morning.”

“Daddy doesn’t know,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time over her glasses. “Well,” she said. “He will.”

He knew by the end of September. My brother Kurt told him.

I had told Kurt on the phone one night when he called about the Labor Day pictures, and I did not tell him to keep it quiet, because I did not want it to be a secret either.

Kurt called me back a week later. He is the middle one, the electrician.

He works for a co-op out of Fairfield and he talks about as much as Daddy does, which is to say almost never.

“I told Dad you were in school,” he said. “I hope that’s all right.”

“It’s all right. What did he say?”

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear a ball game in the background and his kids fighting over something.

Then Kurt said, “He didn’t say anything. He just went out to the garage and stayed out there till dark.”

I did not know what to make of that. I still did not know what to make of it at Thanksgiving.

Shawn called in October. Shawn is the youngest of my brothers and the one who is most like Mama.

He sells insurance in Mount Vernon and he has a laugh you can hear from the parking lot.

“Darrell told me what Dad did with the money,” he said.

“Tonya, that’s not right. That was your account. I was only five, but I remember it, and Mama told it a hundred times. He drove to the bank the same day you came home from the hospital.”

“It’s done, Shawn. It went to Dylan. Dylan should go to school.”

“I know he should. That’s not my point.” He was quiet for a second. “You want me to talk to him? I’ll talk to him.”

I thought about it. I want to be honest and say I thought about it for a long time.

Shawn could have done it. Daddy has always listened to Shawn more than he listened to the rest of us.

“No,” I said. “Thank you. But no. If he’s got something to say to me, I’d rather he figured out how to say it himself.”

Darrell, the oldest, never called. Darrell is the one who took over Daddy’s spot at the elevator for ten years before he went to the seed company, and he is more like Daddy than any of us.

But in November, a check came in the mail from Darrell and his wife, Karen, for two hundred dollars, with a note on a sticky pad.

The note said, “For books. Don’t argue. D.”

I did not argue. I bought a used anatomy lab manual and a stethoscope I did not need yet, and I put the rest toward a new tailgate latch for the Chevy.

Midterms nearly broke me. Not the tests themselves. The week of them.

Two aides quit at Maple Grove the same Friday, and Deb begged me to pick up extra shifts, and I did, because we were short and those are my people in those beds.

I worked sixty-two hours that week and took three exams.

On Wednesday night, I came home at eleven-forty and sat in the truck in the driveway with the engine off and could not make myself go inside.