10:18. I sort of glanced at the alarm clock and then sat bolt upright because I was supposed to be up five hours ago! The milking! I pushed back my hair and had another heart attack because my hair was gone. My fingers were going along and then they fell off a cliff because there wasn't any more hair there. Then—whoosh—everything came back: the banquet, the haircut, the drive back from Madison and Curtis's talk about dentists, the truck stop, our arrival home at four a.m., both of us crawling into bed—
I fell back, a little stunned. Curtis wanted to be a dentist? I mean, Amber was one thing, but this was totally out there. I lay there thinking it over. It was funny. It was downright hilarious, when you think about it. Curtis, of all people...
You know how on TV sometimes they have that bit about the good angel and the bad angel? Well, right then and there my good angel, which I didn't even know I had, said to me that if I ever made fun of what he told me I would go straight to hell. Which is true. And I just want you to know I will never do it. So I guess that good angel did her job.
As I lay there thinking about all this, there was this little squeak in the hall and a knock on the door and Mom said, "Dorrie, are you awake?" It occurred to me later that she might have been pacing outside my room for hours, and that squeaky floorboard might have been what woke me up in the first place. But I didn't think of that at the time.
"Can I come in?"
"Okay," I said, even though I wasn't much in the mood for company.
So she came in and settled on the edge of the bed. "How'd you sleep?" she asked, looking at me. Only she didn't look at me because if she had she would have noticed that most of my hair was gone and I looked totally different. She wasn't looking at me at all. She was in some completely different place.
"Okay," I said. But I had the feeling that I could have said, Not a wink, and she wouldn't have noticed.
She sat there for a while rubbing my knee through the covers, not saying much.
Finally, I asked, "Is everything okay?" Because I was beginning to wonder who died. Maybe she had some news from Win or Bill she needed to share.
"Oh, it's fine," she said, looking out the window like she'd never seen it before.
So I started looking out the window too, just for something to do, at the frilly curtains from when I was eleven and Mom decided it was time to redo my room. "You're not a little girl anymore, you're almost a teenager," she'd said, which was something I wanted to hear only slightly more than that I was about to get a lobotomy. And she'd put up this flowery wallpaper and white curtains, and fixed up Grandma Joyce's sewing table for my desk, and a couple other things that, well, they weren't me then and that aren't me now. I stared at those curtains, thinking that maybe I could slip them under the bed. Just have shades like the boys do.
"I remember when you were born," Mom said, making me jump. "I was so happy to have a little girl." Then she didn't say anything else, letting that just hang in the air.
"Oh," I said.
"I didn't have a little girl for long." She smiled kind of sadly. "I don't think you know how proud we are of you. Your father, he's told me at least a dozen times in the past six months how proud he is." She looked at me again—looked at me without looking at me, if you know what I mean. "If it hadn't been for you, we would have had to sell the farm. Did you know that?"
I shook my head. This was getting heavy. The problem was, I didn't know where it was going. She was saying some amazing things, but I was so busy waiting for the But that I didn't have anything left to appreciate them. They were just wasted.
She sighed again, rubbing my leg like it was a magic lamp or something. "I just want you to know that you don't have to prove anything to us. To me or Dad. We love you so much."
Again: what was coming next? Because you don't just say words like that just to put them out there. Not those words. Not in my family, anyway.
"You don't have to play football for us."
"What?" I asked, sitting about a foot higher in bed.
"Your trying out, it makes me see how we haven't been appreciating you enough. But you don't have to—"
"How do you know about that?"
Mom eyed me. "Jeff Peterson came to the Board of Ed meeting last night to give us a heads up."
"Oh," I said. "I didn't know about that."
"Neither did I," she said, probably sharper than she meant to.
Ouch. I mean, there you are, acting principal, and the football coach stands up and says your daughter wants to play football? Of course everyone would look at you, and you'd look pretty stupid when you said you had no idea. The last thing I wanted was to make her life any harder than it already was. Here she was, stuck between Dad and Win and Bill, with Curtis not talking, and it wasn't fair for her to go around thinking I was losing it too. I didn't mind Dad thinking that, but it wasn't fair to her.
Finally, just to say something, I blurted out, "It's got nothing to do with Dad." I tried to find the words. "It's just that I spent all summer feeling like I was doing everything I was supposed to, and seeing everyone around me doing what they were supposed to, and no one seemed happy. They just seemed caught. And I was so unhappy I tried to find something that made me happy, and then I had this idea of playing football. And that made me happy. So I thought I'd try."
Mom swallowed. "Do you think I'm unhappy?"
Oh, boy. Out of the frying pan into the fire. "No," I lied.
"Because I really like my job."
"But it takes all your time," I said.
"Well, teaching and administration, that's a lot."
"But you're never home," I said.
Mom looked away. I had this feeling she was doing everything she could not to lose it. "It's just," she said, "that there's not a whole lot for me at home right now."
That hung there in the air for about a million years. What do you say to that? Maybe Oprah would know what to say Maybe if we were driving back from Madison I could come up with something. But I didn't have two or three exits to work it through. I had only my crummy old bed, and that wasn't good enough.
"They offered me the job," she said, so quietly it took me a couple moments to register. "The principal job. Give up teaching and just do that."
"Wow." I chewed on that for a little bit.
"What do you think?" She asked it like my opinion really mattered to her.
I thought about her saying how much she liked her job. Just visiting her office, you could see how happy it made her. "Go for it."
She burst into this huge smile and threw her arms around me.
Finally, just to get her off me, I asked, "Are you okay with me playing football?"
She pulled back and studied my face. "Oh! When did you cut your hair?"
"In Madison." I tried not to blush—she was really looking me over. "I spent all the money on it. I'm sorry."
"It looks great," she said, turning my chin.
"It didn't fit under the helmet," I said. "With the ponytail."
She brushed a wisp out of my face. "Oh, D.J."
"Did you tell Dad?" I asked. "About football?"
"I wanted to talk to you first. You don't have to be so hard on him, you know. He never wanted to be a farmer. He gave up a lot for this place."
"Jeez." Which Mom doesn't like, but there wasn't anything else I could think of to say.
She patted my knee. "He's not that unhappy. He loves to cook."
There was another long silence, but it was okay. I could hear Dad downstairs, banging around.
"I should go," Mom said, patting my knee again. "This was real nice, us talking."
"It was," I said, feeling like someone at the end of an Oprah Winfrey show.
"Do you really like football?"
I nodded.
"Then that's a good reason to play."
"If I make the team," I added.
"You'll make the team."
"You always say that," I said.
"I always know," she said with a smile, and she left.
I lay there for a while longer, staring out the window. And you want to know what I thought about? That maybe I should leave those curtains up just a little bit longer because my mom wanted them so much. For me, her only daughter.