Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

Twenty-two miles

Winner is twenty-two miles from our place, down a county road and then the highway. I drove it in nineteen minutes, which is not a number I am proud of.

Alvin’s house sits on an acreage at the edge of town, a tidy ranch house with a steel shop out back and a gravel drive. Shauna was standing in that drive when I pulled up, with her arms crossed over a gray sweatshirt.

She is thirty-eight. She is a pretty woman, the kind who irons her jeans, and she looked at that moment about twelve years old, braced for a spanking she half expected and half wanted.

I got out of the truck and left the door open. Behind her, past the corner of the shop, I could see the burn barrel, a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum with a thin gray thread of smoke still coming off it.

“It smelled,” Shauna said.

I had a lot of things I could have said. I had been rehearsing a few of them for nineteen minutes.

“I know it did,” I said.

That was all. Shauna blinked. She had braced for a fight, and I gave her none, and I watched her not know what to do with that.

Josie came out the side door with her overnight bag over one shoulder and a small clear sandwich bag in her fist. She did not look at Shauna. She walked to the truck and climbed in and set the bag on her knee.

I shut my door and backed out slowly. In the mirror, Shauna was still standing in the gravel with her hand against her mouth.

What she saved

Josie did not say a word until we were out on the highway, past the grain elevator where I work, past the Dairy Queen with its sign promising a Blizzard of the month.

Then she opened her hand.

Inside the sandwich bag was a black zipper pull, the little tab, smeared with soot. Beside it lay a curl of gold embroidery about the length of my thumb, the edge of it scorched brown.

“I got them out when she went in to start the dishes,” Josie said. Her voice was perfectly level. That was how I knew she was holding on by her fingernails. “I used a stick.”

“Out of the barrel?”

“It was still warm. I think the zipper was the last thing to go.”

I put on my blinker and eased onto the gravel shoulder. I did not trust my eyes on the road. A semi went by and rocked the truck on its springs.

“I’ll just give the speech in my sweatshirt,” Josie said. “It doesn’t matter, Mom. It’s fabric.”

“It matters.”

“The judges won’t care.”

“The judges will care. The rule is the rule, and you know it.” I took the sandwich bag from her, gently, and looked at the little black tab in the palm of my hand. “And I care. You rewrote the ending of that speech four times.”

She turned her face to the window. Her shoulders went, just once, and then she pulled herself back together like a woman folding a tablecloth.

I did not tell her it would be all right. I did not know yet that it would. I only put the bag back in her hand, closed her fingers over it, and drove her home.