Educated

remember the days before the accident. Truck, trailer and excavator were
totaled.
Dad’s determination was etched into his face. It was in his voice, in the
harshness of it. He had to win this standoff. He’d convinced himself that if I
was on the crew, there’d be fewer accidents, fewer setbacks. “You’re slower
than tar running uphill,” he’d told me a dozen times. “But you get the job
done without smashing anything.”
But I couldn’t do the job, because to do it would be to slide backward. I
had moved home, to my old room, to my old life. If I went back to working
for Dad, to waking up every morning and pulling on steel-toed boots and
trudging out to the junkyard, it would be as if the last four months had never
happened, as if I had never left.
I pushed past Dad and shut myself in my room. Mother knocked a moment
later. She stepped into the room quietly and sat so lightly on the bed, I barely
felt her weight next to me. I thought she would say what she’d said last time.
Then I’d remind her I was only seventeen, and she’d tell me I could stay.
“You have an opportunity to help your father,” she said. “He needs you.
He’ll never say it but he does. It’s your choice what to do.” There was
silence, then she added, “But if you don’t help, you can’t stay here. You’ll
have to live somewhere else.”
The next morning, at four A.M., I drove to Stokes and worked a ten-hour
shift. It was early afternoon, and raining heavily, when I came home and
found my clothes on the front lawn. I carried them into the house. Mother
was mixing oils in the kitchen, and she said nothing as I passed by with my
dripping shirts and jeans.
I sat on my bed while the water from my clothes soaked into the carpet. I’d
taken a phone with me, and I stared at it, unsure what it could do. There was
no one to call. There was nowhere to go and no one to call.
I dialed Tyler in Indiana. “I don’t want to work in the junkyard,” I said
when he answered. My voice was hoarse.
“What happened?” he said. He sounded worried; he thought there’d been
another accident. “Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone’s fine,” I said. “But Dad says I can’t stay here unless I work in
the junkyard, and I can’t do that anymore.” My voice was pitched unnaturally
high, and it quivered.
Tyler said, “What do you want me to do?”