The Plate I Set for the Man Who Rents Dad’s Hay

The Folgers Can

My own secret started in March, about the same time Wade’s wife left, though the two things had nothing to do with each other until September made them have something to do with each other.

Mom always said I would be a nurse. She said it when I was six and bandaged every one of my dolls.

She said it when I was fourteen and sat with Grandpa at the end. She said it the last spring of her life, when I learned how to flush her port and the hospice nurse told her I had better hands than half the girls she trained.

After she died, I did not go to college. Megan was already gone to Grand Island, married and working. Dad was alone with three hundred acres of wheat and sixty head of cows and a house full of Mom’s things.

Somebody had to stay. I was eighteen and I was the only one left, so I stayed.

I do not regret that. I want that clear too. I fed calves in the dark and drove the grain truck at harvest and learned to make Mom’s pot roast, and Dad and I got through the worst of it together.

Some nights the only sound in that house was the two of us washing dishes, him drying, me washing, neither of us talking.

But in March I took the entrance exam for the nursing program at the community college in Kearney. I drove the thirty-some miles on my day off and told Dad I was going to the Walmart.

In June the letter came saying I was accepted for the January class. I hid it in my dresser under my winter socks.

The deposit was six hundred dollars to hold my seat. I paid it out of tips. I had been saving them since high school in Mom’s old Folgers can, the big red one she kept her button collection in.

I took the buttons out and put them in a jar, and the tips went into the can, folded flat, one dollar and five dollars at a time.

Wade’s folded squares went in there too. Nine years of them, if you count back. I did not think about that until later, and when I did think about it I felt sick.

I did not tell Dad because I could not figure out how. Every time I tried, I would see him coming in from the cows in the dark with his face red from the cold, and I would see him eating supper alone at that table, and the words would not come.

I kept telling myself there was time. January was a long way off.