The Diploma Beside the Cake

She looked at me. I nodded. She walked across that hall in her gray boots, past forty-one people, and every one of them watched her go.

Grandpa Chester is a long, thin man who has shrunk into his shirts. He has a big beaked nose and ears that have kept growing even as the rest of him goes down.

His hands, though, are still enormous, spotted and corded, with a thumbnail on the left one that has been black since 1954.

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pocket magnifier, the kind a machinist carries, and set it on his knee. “Bring me that paper,” he said. “Heather. Would you?”

I carried the diploma over and put it in his lap. Kenzie stood beside his chair with her hands still folded.

He read it. He took his time. He held the magnifier over the seal and then over each line, the way I imagine he once read a blueprint, and he moved his lips slightly.

“December nineteenth,” he said at last. “That’s a semester early.” “Yes, sir,” Kenzie said. “Not many do that.” “No, sir. There were three of us in the county.”

“Hm.” He looked up at her over his glasses. “Girl, are you expecting a baby?”

A ripple went through the room, half a gasp, half a laugh. I saw Helene press her napkin to her lips.

Kenzie did not blink. “No, sir,” she said. “I’m expecting to be on the floor at seven tomorrow morning.”

Somebody in the back laughed out loud. Then somebody else. Grandpa Chester’s mouth twitched at the corner. “Let me see the stub,” he said.

I brought it. He held the magnifier to it and ran his big blackened thumbnail along the lines. “Forty hours. Nineteen dollars.” He grunted. “Seven hundred sixty. Who’s your foreman?”

“Mr. Loren Gentry, sir.” “Gentry from Birch River? His daddy ran second shift at the prep plant.” “Yes, sir. That’s him.” “What are they having you do?”

“Mostly skid frames, Grandpa. For the gas wells. We run wire feed on three-eighths plate, and I’m learning to read the layout drawings on the bigger jobs.

Mr. Gentry says by spring I can start on the pressure work if my beads stay clean.”

“Do they stay clean?” “Mostly,” Kenzie said. “Not always.” “Honest,” said Grandpa. “That’s good. Show me your hands.” She took them out of her pockets and held them out, palms down.

He set the magnifier aside and turned each one over in his two huge ones, and looked at the scars, and put the pad of his thumb across the worst of them, a pale shiny line across her right knuckle where a piece of hot steel had gotten under a glove in March.

“That’s slag,” he said. “Yes, sir. First week of March. I didn’t cry.” “I didn’t ask if you cried.” “No, sir.”

He turned his own left hand over, the one with the black thumbnail. “A drop forge did this. Nineteen fifty-four. First week on the job.

I was eighteen years old and they paid me a dollar and ten cents an hour. My mother Ella cried when I brought the first envelope home. She kept the envelope in her Bible until she died.”

Kenzie’s chin was trembling now. She pressed her lips together hard.