The Class Ring in the Nursing Home Hallway

My sister told my daughter in the church parking lot, beside my truck, with the last of the Sunday crowd still shaking hands with the pastor on the steps behind us.

“Honey, I hate to tell you this,” Dorrie said, “but Grandpa just can’t afford anything for graduation this year. Things are tight with the home and everything. I didn’t want you waiting on a card.”

She said it kindly enough. She had her hand on Darby’s arm. If you had walked past us right then, you would have thought she was a good aunt giving bad news gently.

Darby was eighteen and three weeks from walking across the stage in the high school gym.

She looked at her aunt, then at the gravel, then back up, and she smiled the way her mother smiles at the school office when a parent is rude to her.

“That’s fine, Aunt Dorrie,” she said. “Tell Grandpa not to worry about it. I just want him to know I graduated.”

Dorrie patted her arm and walked off toward her own car, where her son Callan was already in the passenger seat looking at nothing.

I stood there with my keys in my hand and did not say a word.

My name is Burke Gaskins. I am forty-five years old, and I manage the grain elevator on the north edge of Carmi, Illinois, in White County, down where the Little Wabash bends.

My wife, Jill, is the secretary at the grade school. Darby is our only child.

She had been accepted to the nursing program at the community college in Harrisburg, about forty minutes south, and she was going to start in August.

My father is Lavern Gaskins. He is eighty-eight. He farmed corn and beans and a little wheat on the river bottom east of town for over sixty years, and he graduated from high school in 1956.

Two winters ago he slipped on the ice going out to check the mailbox. He broke his hip and lay in the drive for almost an hour before the propane man found him.

After the surgery, the doctor said he could not live alone on the farm anymore.

So he went into the nursing home on the west end of town. He hated it for about a month, and then he decided to like it, the way he decided most things.

He made friends with the men at the dayroom table and beat them at dominoes.

His mind never slipped. Not once. He could still tell you what beans brought in 1974 and which neighbor borrowed his post driver and never brought it back. He did the newspaper crossword in pen.

But his hands shook, and his eyes were not good for small numbers anymore.

So when he went into the home, my sister Dorrie went down to the bank with him and got put on his checking account as a joint signer.

That was the right thing to do. Somebody had to pay the home, the pharmacy, the farm rent coming in, the property tax on the land he still owned.

Dorrie lived ten minutes from the home. I lived ten minutes from the home too, but I worked sixty hours a week at the elevator in harvest.

So Dorrie took the checkbook. She went to see Dad three times a week. I went on Sundays after church and sometimes on a Wednesday night if the trucks were done early.

I knew she was carrying more of it than I was. I knew it every Sunday.