The Graduation Check He Took Back

Thad calls

Thad called from the motel a little after eleven. I could hear a television on in the next room through the wall and the ice machine running down the hall.

“I talked to Dad,” he said. “Nadia texted me. I called him from the truck.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he earned that money over forty-one years at the foundry and he’d decide where it went.” Thad let out a long breath. “He said a grandkid of his wasn’t going to spend it learning to do perms.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him he was wrong,” Thad said. “And I told him he’d figure it out on his own, because he always does, just slower than everybody else.”

That was it. That was the whole call between them. Thad is his father’s son. They can fix a downed line in a sleet storm together without saying ten words, and they can have a fight the same way.

Before he hung up he said, “Tell her I said she can cut mine first. Whatever she wants. Mohawk. I don’t care.”

What we knew about Silas

Here is what I knew about my father-in-law on graduation day, after twenty-three years.

He was born in 1954 on a farm near Westport. He graduated high school in 1972 and went to work at the foundry in Columbus that fall.

He poured iron and then ran a crew for forty-one years and retired in 2013 with a gold watch he keeps in the box.

He drank his coffee black at the Hardee’s in town every morning at six with the same group of retired men. He tipped twenty percent and he paid cash.

He had never, in all those years, talked to me about school. Not his, not Thad’s, not anybody’s.

When Thad went straight to the co-op after high school instead of college, Silas didn’t say a word about it either way.

So I did not understand the parking lot. I thought it was pride. I thought it was an old man who didn’t think doing hair was real work, and I was angry about it all summer.

I turned out to be about half right, which is about how right I usually am.

The summer

Nadia worked all summer at the Dairy Queen on the east side of town and at the sweet corn stand on the highway on weekends. She saved every dollar.

The school in Columbus was accredited, which meant she could get federal aid.

Between the Pell grant, a small loan, my thousand and her own money, she had her first year paid for and her kit ordered by the end of July.

Indiana wants fifteen hundred hours before you can sit for the state board, the written test and the practical.

Full time, that’s most of a year if you never miss a day. Nadia made a chart and taped it inside her closet door.

Silas did not call all summer. At church he nodded to me from the fourth pew and I nodded back.

People knew. Of course people knew. Greensburg is a town where the courthouse has trees growing out of its tower and everybody can tell you which ones.

Two families saw that parking lot, and by the Fourth of July half the county had heard some version.

I carry mail on a rural route, the south half of the county, a hundred and four miles a day. People talk to their mail carrier. I heard about that check at about thirty mailboxes.

“Is it true Silas Miller took money back from his own granddaughter?” one woman asked me, holding her water bill. “At graduation? In front of people?”

“It’s true he took it back,” I said. “That’s all of it that’s true so far.”