Queen Bee Goes Home Again

by Haywood Smith

  And as Tommy had said, there were always a few scoundrels in the mix.

  I sent up an arrow prayer: Lord, keep us from some wolf in sheep’s clothing. Things are hard enough as it is.

  I sure would hate to see things at City Hall go downhill. Especially since we now had an olde towne district to take care of.

  Tommy broke my concentration by asking, “So, what do you have on tap for this afternoon, after we see Dad?”

  Convinced I wouldn’t get it, I confessed, “I thought I’d go over to Ocee U. to get an application and find out if it’s too late to get in. Assuming I can get a scholarship.”

  Tommy cocked back, dubious. “You’re serious about that?”

  “I know. I’m old. But real estate is out, for obvious reasons, and I’m not really fit for anything else. I can’t touch-type or do anything complicated on a computer, and my knees are so bad, I can’t work on my feet. Education is one field where my age won’t work against me. I was thinking of teaching high school English.”

  My brother’s expression screwed up. “High school English? Are you crazy? Have you seen the teenagers out there?”

  “Yes, and I have a perverse affection for them. Don’t ask me why, but I do.” I stared at him, flat-mouthed. “At least I’d have some benefits till I qualify for Medicare.” Assuming I got my certificate in three years, going full-time. “Plus, the vacations are great.”

  “I think you’ve lost your mind,” he whispered, leaning forward. “Haven’t you heard all the jokes about having an English degree and not being able to find work? Google it. And what happens if you spend all that time and money to get a teaching certificate, and nobody wants to hire you?”

  “I’ll deal with that when it happens,” I told him calmly, my resolve stiffening against his rejection. “But this is my plan.” My impulse, actually, but he didn’t need to know that.

  Tommy cocked an eyebrow. “I think you might want to consider a plan B. Like another job.”

  I leaned forward to whisper, “I tried to find another job, but nobody wants a sixty-year-old high school graduate with bad knees, who can’t touch-type or use Excel, or work an electronic cash register, or balance a checkbook. The only openings I could find were collection agencies, straight commission sales for pyramid companies, phone sex, and telemarketers, but you have to draw the line somewhere.”

  Tommy shot me a smug expression. “I don’t know; what does the phone sex pay?”

  “Very funny.” Why couldn’t he at least be a little supportive about my going to college? “Never mind,” I concluded. Since both of us were finished, I picked up my purse as I rose. “Let’s go see Daddy.”

  As he looked up at me, Tommy’s face reflected a twinge of regret. “I’m sorry. I was wrong to be so negative. I know you’re just doing the best you can.” Which was AA-speak for doing things that were hurtful or unwise.

  “Why don’t you go back for a degree, too?” I challenged. “Or technical school. Who knows? Maybe you could graduate with me.”

  Tommy barked a laugh. “No way. I long ago drank away too many gray cells.” He grabbed the check, then threw a generous three-dollar tip on the table. “And anyway, I have a job, fixing things for hire and looking after the Mame and the house. And the General.” He got up, then followed me to the front. “You’re the smart one. You’ll do fine, I know it.”

  “But first,” I told him as we reached the register, “I have to get a scholarship.”

  After we checked out, we drove to the Home. On the way, I told Tommy what had happened there the day I’d moved home, and both of us ended up hilarious.

  As luck would have it, we came in to find Daddy and Uncle Bedford decently dressed in flannel pajama pants and matching VFW T-shirts. Daddy immediately strode over to give Tommy a back-clapping man-hug, but it took Uncle Bedford time to recognize me.

  “Are you that boy?” he grumbled. “That gay guy?”

  Ignoring my sore knees, I crouched in front of his wheelchair and gently stroked his hair away from his face. “No, sweetie. It’s Lins-a-pin, your niece.”

  Daddy’s geriatric psychiatrist had said that even if they were deaf, people with Alzheimer’s were highly sensitive to touch, tone, and expression, so I did my best to act calm and reassuring. I smiled up at him despite the tears that stung the backs of my eyes when I thought of the lively, laughing man he’d once been.

  His expression cleared, and for a moment he looked like himself again. “Hey there, little girl. You come back home?”

  I nodded. “Yep. I’ve come back home.”

  The question was, would I ever escape again?

  The odds were against it, but maybe that wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  “Lin!” Daddy hollered. “Get over here and tell your brother to quit mumblin’. I cain’t hear a bleemin’ thing he says.”

  I gave Uncle Bedford a pat, then rose to face the General with a purposeful smile on my face. “He’s not mumbling, Daddy,” I said distinctly into his better ear. “If you want to hear people, let us get you some hearing aids.”

  Tommy started laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We got him some. Twice.” Tommy gave Daddy a sidelong hug, then sat him aslant on the bottom corner of the bed and stepped behind him, massaging our father’s sloping shoulders, which Daddy seemed to enjoy.

  Out of the General’s line of sight, Tommy explained quietly, “He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—adjust to them, so he kept taking them out and hiding them to get us to stop trying to make him wear them.”

  He shook his head. “When they disappeared, we got new ones with the insurance, but the insurer said they would only replace them once in four years. I explained it to the General, but the next thing you know, he’d chewed the replacements to pieces and swallowed them with his chili, so that was that. Sayonara, six-thousand-dollar state-of-the-art hearing aids, plus a trip to the emergency room to have the pieces fished out of his stomach.”

  Tommy hadn’t told me about any of that. Or the Mame. Apparently, the sane members of my family had cut me out of the loop.

  I scowled. “He chewed them up?” Yuk.

  “Yep.”

  I gave Daddy a bear hug. “You sweet, silly old fella,” I said softly into his ear. “I love you.”

  My father wrapped his long, sun-freckled arms around me and murmured back, sweet as could be, “I love you too, Lin. Always have. Always will.”

  For that precious moment, I had my daddy back, and the world was put to rights.

  Until I got to Ocee University.

  Six

  Twenty minutes north of Mimosa Branch, I found the campus of Ocee University sparsely inhabited by summer-quarter students, most of whom looked too young to drive. The one-story brick buildings were attractive, but far spread, and the grassy quadrangle had been burned to tan by the drought. Beyond the library, I noted a gym and a new humanities building with five stories.

  Nice, but lots of steps between classes.

  I followed the directionals to the registrar’s office (as far from where I’d parked as you could get), then signed in behind two girls who were decked out in major slut, with large tattoos on their upper arms and multiple piercings, both of them glued to their smartphones, one texting and the other playing games.

  God forgive me, but I judged them. I know it was wrong, but I mean, isn’t that the whole point of how people present themselves: to show the world what kind of person they are? The message from these two was, cheap, easy, and phone-obsessed.

  The girls sat down on opposite sides of the room while I filled in the “purpose for your visit” blank with I want to go back for my degree on scholarship, then sat down without even a brief glance from the girls.

  So much for the chance to ask them how they liked it there.

  If you ask me, “smart” phones and electronic tablets will be the death of real human communication. At the first opportunity, kids dive into their world of games and texts, remaining isolated from a
ny real relationships and hiding behind their user names. Not to mention causing car wrecks.

  Bossy as I am, I couldn’t resist asking them in a loud voice, “Hi. When y’all go out, do you just text your dates, or actually talk?”

  Both girls briefly glared at me as if I were dog-doo, then resumed what they were doing without comment.

  “I thought so.”

  Half an hour into the hour I waited, the receptionist rose to tell me, “Miz Scott, if you’ll please follow me, you can fill out our application on our computer and the FAFSA before Miz Brady sees you.”

  I approached her, leaning close to her to whisper, “I’m sorry, but what’s a FAFSA?”

  “It’s the form all students have to fill out to apply for assistance,” she blared out cheerily for anyone and everyone to hear.

  Scalded by embarrassment, I straightened to my full height and looked down my nose at her. “I thought such things were confidential,” I said softly. “Would you please lower your voice?”

  “Sorry,” she said without feeling, then led me to a hall alcove with a computer. “Let me just pull this up for you.” Standing, she typed away at blazing speed with her black, acrylic talons, going through several screens till the registration form came up. “Just fill in the blanks. If you make a mistake, you can go back and correct it. Until you hit the ‘completed’ button, so don’t hit that till it’s ready to go.”

  She stepped back, and I sat with trepidation. I knew how to do basic word processing and e-mails and Facebook; that was it. But I’d croak before I bared my ignorance by asking that chiquitita for help.

  It was a good thing I had to wait so long, because it took every minute for me to complete the registration form. I mean, who the heck remembers when they “graduated” from elementary school? I hadn’t thought of that since I’d filled out an application for the temp service when I’d first moved back home ten years ago. As it had then, it took some serious mental math for me to come up with the dates they were asking for. I knew when I’d graduated from high school (1968) and the year I’d been at Sandford College: from fall of 1968 to May of 1969, when I’d met and then married my ex, Phil.

  And as for my job history, I’d had nine menial jobs in my teens and first two years of marriage before I got serious about infertility therapy and finally gave birth to David four years later. I knew how many jobs because Phil had needled me about it forever, but I could only remember four of them: Teen Board; sales associate at Baker’s Department Store in Mimosa Branch; receptionist and tester for a temporary service; and being a very bored private secretary for one of my father’s surveyor friends. So I put those down and spread the dates to cover the whole time, despite a gasp of horror from my inner Puritan.

  It wasn’t as if they could check the dates. All three companies were long since out of business, something I had nothing to do with, I swear.

  My Puritan hopped to my shoulder and scolded me for not being completely honest, but my Practical Self gave her the raspberry.

  I mean, it wasn’t a lie if I couldn’t remember, was it? And I definitely didn’t think a big question mark would impress the admissions committee, so there you are.

  Oh, gosh. Could it be the beginnings of Alzheimer’s that I couldn’t remember?

  I shuddered, stuffed the idea into a mental cubbyhole and slammed the door, and went on.

  I filled the next twenty-eight-year span with “homemaker and mother.” Last, but by no means least, I listed my career selling and appraising residential real estate, then added my professional degrees and qualifications.

  Then I filled in the rest of the form.

  I had just reread it, then clicked the “completed” button, setting off the printer beside me, when the loudmouthed receptionist snuck up behind me and blared, “Miz Brady is ready to see you, now.”

  I jumped half out of my skin. “I’m just old, not deaf,” I grumbled as I stood.

  Unfazed, the girl handed me the now printed application. “It’s the last door at the end of the hall.” She pulled a yellow handout from the stack file on the wall. “I see you didn’t get to the FAFSA, so here’s one you can take home and fill out.”

  One? I made a mental note to pick up several more on my way out, just in case I made mistakes, which I always did when filling out forms—a perverse bit of masochism that sprang from I knew not where.

  Inside the office at the end of the hall, a kind-looking black woman (correction: African American) rose behind her desk with a welcoming smile, then closed the door behind me.

  Good. I didn’t want my business spread all over campus.

  “Hi.” Her smile was warm and open. “I take it you’re the ‘mean woman’ who insulted my two previous appointments,” she said with wry humor. “They told me what you said.”

  Heat pulsed up my neck to bloom in my cheeks. “Guilty as charged.”

  She grinned, extending her hand in greeting. “Good for you. Welcome to Ocee. I’m Pam Brady.”

  I shook, finding her grip firm and dry. “I’m Lin Breedlove Scott. Thanks for seeing me without an appointment.”

  “Things are a little slow in the summer, so we could fit you in,” Pam Brady explained as she sat. “Please have a seat, and we’ll go over your application.” She scanned the printout as I perched nervously in the chair facing her.

  I was relieved that she didn’t snort or laugh in derision while she read.

  When she finished inspecting the registration form, she leaned back with an affable, “It’s too late for fall semester, but you’re right on time for winter/spring applications. That quarter starts in January, the sixth. You can finish filling out the FAFSA at home and bring it back, along with an active passport or official copy of your birth certificate, your driver’s license, and a copy of the last year of your tax returns.”

  She glanced at the printout again, then turned her attention back to me. “To give me a better idea of your qualifications for aid, would you mind my asking you a few financial questions? Strictly confidential, of course.”

  She must have seen that I was skeptical, because she told me, “All our information is confidential and accessible only to qualified staff, not student aides.”

  “Thanks. That’s a relief.” I relaxed a bit. “What would you like to know?’

  “What was your AGI for last year?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “We get so used to the acronyms around here. Your adjusted gross income from your tax return.”

  “Oh.” I thought for a minute, picturing the screens of my online tax prep program. “I’m an independent contractor, so I have lots of expenses and health insurance to write off.” My mind finally got to the AGI screen. “To the best of my recollection, the AGI would be about twenty-six thousand. But my taxable income was only twelve.”

  She nodded and jotted that down on a notepad on her desk.

  “And this year, to date?” she asked. “Just a ballpark estimate will be fine for now.”

  I sighed, the figure sticking in my throat. I knew exactly how little I’d made in the seven months since New Year’s Day. “Three thousand, seven hundred, twenty-two dollars. Gross. With no prospects pending for more.”

  Her brows shot up. “Hard year for everybody.” She wrote it down. “Any assets?”

  “Just my 2009 minivan. I lost my house to a short sale. My credit rating’s trashed, and I’m broke, except for two hundred dollars in my checking account.” Shoot. Would that be enough for the registration fee?

  She brightened. “So you’re homeless?”

  That was good news?

  “Actually,” I said, “I moved back into my ninety-year-old mother’s because I didn’t have the deposit for an apartment.”

  She lifted an index finger. “We have special funds for the homeless, but I’ll have to check to see if your situation qualifies. Is your mother receiving any income beyond Social Security?”

  “Not that I know of.” I’d have to ask her. Fo
r all my mother’s gossipy phone calls, what I didn’t know about Miss Mamie was a lot.

  Maybe that was why she liked to talk about everybody else so much; it kept the focus off her.

  Pam Brady made a note in the margin. “Based on what you’ve told me, I think you’ll qualify for a Pell Grant. But things are so crazy in this economy, not to mention the whole undocumented student situation, that there’s fierce competition for the assistance we have left.”

  My face must have fallen, because she was quick to say, “But don’t get discouraged. Since you’re an overage female, I’m almost positive I can find some help for you.”

  Overage female? Was that what I’d been reduced to?

  She chuckled at my indignation. “That term applies only to scholarship applicants. Here, you’ll be designated as a nontraditional student, along with anybody else over twenty-five.”

  Better.

  “And what is your life plan for after you graduate?” she asked me.

  Life plan? Please.

  I started to say breathing, but thought better of it.

  I supposed I had to get used to the jargon. “I want to teach English in high school.”

  She nodded her approval. “Some systems will repay your student loans in exchange for teaching with them for two years.” I knew enough teachers to know that those jobs were almost always at inner-city schools.

  I was too old and too slow for combat conditions, so I shook my head in denial. “Ma’am, I am sixty years old. The last thing I need is debt of any kind. If I can’t get a scholarship, I can’t go to school. It’s that simple.”

  She rose, offering her hand in dismissal. “Let’s see what we can do, then. Take a few more of those FAFSA forms home with you. Fill one out to bring back with a copy of your last year’s tax return.” Sticking to the script, she went on with, “And your driver’s license and a current passport, if you have one, or an official copy of your birth certificate. And we’ll need transcripts from Sandford and your high school. Please have them sent directly to us. The address is on the application.”