glared at me, then down at my book, like he was mad at us both. “What the hell is that?” he said, still kind of yelling.
“Amputation,” I said.
“You want to live in a new house with all the modern conveniences?”
I tried to imagine anyone in my position at that moment who would say anything different, even LaRhonda or Tommy. “No,” I said.
My father walked out the back door and let it slam behind him. “Get back here,” my mother called from their bedroom window, but my father just kept walking down the back path and into the dark.
I was happy that only the valedictorian gave a speech at the high school graduation. My mother was annoyed, though. “Every other school, they both speak, number one, number two,” she said. “How will anyone know you were the salutatorian if you don’t get to speak?”
“It’s in the program,” I said. It also said I’d won the 1971 Chamber of Commerce Mathematics Prize. Richard got the science prize, although neither of us had placed out of our region with our projects. He’d been very disappointed, but I knew I wasn’t going to win with “Andover, Pennsylvania, 1921–1930: A History of Water Management in a Drowned Town.”
“You pulled your punches, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally had said after he’d polished off a western omelet at one of my tables the week after the regionals. “I thought you were going to be taking a good hard look at the water situation in Miller’s Valley, not go over ancient history.”
“I did take a good hard look,” I said as I refilled his coffee cup. “I don’t know that you would have liked much what I saw.” That was as close as I ever got to saying that I suspected what the government people had been up to. I stood at the table with the coffeepot in my hand and looked at him with my eyes narrowed.
“Aha,” he said. That was it.
“Oh, Mimi, you took me right back to when I was a girl!” Cissy had said, clapping her soft little hands.
“It turned out a little more like a history project than I expected,” Mrs. Farrell said. I could tell she was disappointed in me, and since she’d seen Steven pick me up a couple of times in his truck I was betting she thought he was the reason I hadn’t done better. I couldn’t really tell her what had happened. I wanted to say, Mrs. Farrell, if you did research and found out that someone you really loved was going to die, would you publish it or keep it to yourself? But I just came up with my own answer, and did what I did, and didn’t do what I couldn’t bring myself to do.
I got a check from the Chamber of Commerce for a hundred dollars for the math prize, and a check from the PTA for a hundred dollars for being salutatorian, and Mr. Venti surprised me by giving me a hundred dollars in new twenty-dollar bills in a card shaped like a mortarboard. With the money I’d saved from my job and a scholarship I’d gotten from the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters, I’d be able to make it through at least two years at the state university, and Mrs. Farrell said she was sure there was more scholarship money out there for a woman in math and science. I liked it, when she said that, like I was actually a woman, and in math and science.
My parents had a party in our yard, the tables set up between the back of our house and the front of Ruth’s. If you talked to my mother she said that was the best place because there was plenty of room and some trees for shade. If you talked to my father he said it was the best place because then Ruth could sit in a chair by her window and hear most of what was going on. Steven insisted on walking with one arm around me, telling people to take a good look at the gold heart with the diamond at its center he’d given me as a gift. “It’s a quarter carat,” he said over and over again. “When she graduates from college there’ll be a bigger stone, and it won’t be in a necklace.” He’d already bought one house and then resold it. He’d made almost two thousand dollars and said next time it would be more when he was finished with the two