I worked it free, saw what it was, and had to sit down at the kitchen table, because it was a receipt from the bursar’s office at Zane State, my name on it, tuition and fees paid in full for the fall and spring terms of the practical nursing program.
Paid the ninth of March. Cash. Eleven months before I ever knew it existed.
I quit nursing school in 1989 when I was six weeks from finishing, because my mother had her stroke and somebody had to be at that house, and it was going to be me because it is always the daughter. I have said out loud maybe four times in thirty-six years that I regretted it. Every one of those four times Roy was in the room and every one of those times he didn’t say a word back.
Folded around the receipt was a printout of my transcript from 1989 with a note stapled to it from a woman in admissions saying my clinical credits could be reinstated with a petition, and that they would need a copy of my CPR card and a physical, and that the deadline for fall was the first of June.
He had gone down there himself. My husband, who would not go into a Kroger without me, drove to Zanesville and sat in an admissions office and asked a stranger how a fifty-seven-year-old woman gets back into nursing school.
The last thing in that lining was on the back of a shop receipt.
You had six weeks left and you gave them to your mother and nobody ever gave them back to you. So I bought them. It’s paid, so you can’t say we can’t afford it, and it’s in your name, so you can’t give it to somebody else. That’s the whole trick and I’m sorry, but I know you. Hang onto it. — Roy
That’s the whole trick and I’m sorry, but I know you.
He did know me. If he’d handed me that receipt in July I’d have found nine reasons, and every one of them would have had somebody else’s name in it, and he knew that too, so he sewed it into a wallet and told me there was more to it than leather and let me be disappointed at him.
The drill set is still in the box on his bench. I bought it with money I’d saved eleven months for. He never opened it. Two weeks later he was gone at that workbench and I was the one who found him, and I did not think about a wallet in a drawer for almost a year.
I missed the June deadline he wrote down. Missed it by ten months.
I called that admissions office in April anyway and I got a woman named Trina and I cried on the phone with a stranger like a fool, and she pulled my file, and the money was still sitting there in a credit under my name because nobody had asked for it back.
I started in August. I am the oldest person in that program by nineteen years and my study group calls me Miss Deb and thinks it’s funny to ask me about the eighties.
I pin my clinical badge to my scrub top every morning and I carry a crooked wallet with my initials a little off center, and when the young ones ask about it I tell them my husband made it, which is the truth, and I leave out the rest because I can’t get through it yet.
I graduate in May. He’d have hated the ceremony. He’d have gone anyway and complained about parking.