35STEFFANI
“It’s here—arrived this morning.”
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, phone tucked between my cheek and shoulder. The cardboard envelope waits before me.
“You haven’t opened it yet?” he asks.
“I wanted to wait for you.”
“Well, you have me.”
I’m already reaching for the envelope. It’ll be another few days before Tom returns from his business trip, but I can’t wait that long. This phone call will have to suffice. My finger eases under the flap, ripping it open and revealing the single sheet of card stock inside. I pinch the corner and drag it out. “UNIVERSITY OF OREGON,” it reads, “on recommendation of the Faculty and the COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, confers upon GREER WOODS the degree of BACHELOR OF ARTS.”
I stare at my name until it starts to go blurry, then quickly wipe away any tears that might fall onto the paper.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“I’m thinking we need to get this framed as soon as possible. Knowing me, I’ll knock over a mug of coffee and ruin the damned thing.” My laugh gets all twisted up in my throat, and before I know what’s happening, I’m sobbing into the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Before arriving here, collegeseemed like little more than a pipe dream, but now, the life I always imagined for myself waits just around the corner. Diploma today and tomorrow, my first full-time job as an accounts manager at Woods and Sheridan Architects. And to think, I came so close to throwing it all away.
“We’ll get it framed as soon as I’m back,” he says. “Hang it next to the bookshelf.”
“No putting it on the refrigerator?”
“Well.” He stretches out the word like he’s seriously considering it. “We do need to use those magnets for something.”
The front of our refrigerator is covered with tacky tourism magnets, the kind you pick up in airports when you realize at the last minute that you’ve forgotten to buy something for your wife or kids. He brings one back whenever he goes away on a business trip. My favorite’s the one from Tokyo. A little good luck cat that waves at you when you boop it. I’ve never been anywhere like that, of course, but it reminds me of the closet door my mom and I filled with our AAA brochure clippings.
He took down the photo of the girl a year after I arrived. His daughter, he told me.
Later, he replaced her photo with one of mine.
“Okay.” I wait for him to say goodbye, but he must be able to tell that something’s wrong. “Do you think—” I start but cut myself off.
“Yes?”
“Do you think she would’ve been proud of me?”
I don’t have to specify whosheis.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know anything about her except for what you’ve told me.”
I grab the envelope, trudge back upstairs to my room. “But,” he continues, “I’ll tell you what I do know.”
“What?”
“I know how proud you make me.”
“Thanks.”
I try to prop the diploma on my bedside table, but it keeps slipping away. “I know how much better my life has been since you came into it. I know how hard you’ve worked to get where you are, and I know how much you deserve every good thing that’s come your way.” He hesitates before adding, “I know how much I love you.”
The diploma slides to the floor, but this time, I don’t pick it back up. No one’s said those words to me since before my mom left. Foster families would tell me how much they cared about me, how glad they were to have me in their home, but that’s as far as they went. Eventually, I accepted that I just wasn’tlovematerial—that my dad had broken something inside me, that no one wanted a defective product. Like the Tickle Me Elmo on the clearance shelf that bashes its head against the floor and giggles, “Again! Again!” You take a video with your phone, maybe you even coo and set it back on the shelf, but you’re not going to waste good, hard-earned cash on it.
“Um.” I’m so out of practice, it takes me a moment to respond. “I love you, too.”
It’s not until the words have left me that I realize how true they are. I try to remember the desperate girl who hitchhiked across the country, all so she could hurl herself off a bridge, but I can’t. She’s disappeared in the rearview mirror. I’m someone completely different now—someone who falls asleep every night feeling safe.
Someone who has a home.
