Educated

I passed through his door. I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from
me like a healer draws infection from a wound.
When the semester ended, I told him I was going home for the summer. I
was out of money; I couldn’t pay rent. He looked tired when I told him that.
He said, “Don’t go home, Tara. The church will pay your rent.”
I didn’t want the church’s money. I’d made the decision. The bishop made
me promise only one thing: that I wouldn’t work for my father.
My first day in Idaho, I got my old job back at Stokes. Dad scoffed, said
I’d never earn enough to return to school. He was right, but the bishop had
said God would provide a way and I believed it. I spent the summer
restocking shelves and walking elderly ladies to their cars.
I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and
there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in
high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games
with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to
follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he
screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had
no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me
by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them.
When the summer ended, I returned to BYU with only two thousand
dollars. On my first night back, I wrote in my journal: I have so many bills I
can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them. But God will provide either trials
for growth or the means to succeed. The tone of that entry seems lofty, high-
minded, but in it I detect a whiff of fatalism. Maybe I would have to leave
school. That was fine. There were grocery stores in Utah. I would bag
groceries, and one day I’d be manager.
I was shocked out of this resignation two weeks into the fall semester,
when I awoke one night to a blinding pain in my jaw. I’d never felt anything
so acute, so electrifying. I wanted to rip my jaw from my mouth, just to be rid
of it. I stumbled to a mirror. The source was a tooth that had been chipped
many years before, but now it had fractured again, and deeply. I visited a
dentist, who said the tooth had been rotting for years. It would cost fourteen
hundred dollars to repair. I couldn’t afford to pay half that and stay in school.
I called home. Mother agreed to lend me the money, but Dad attached
terms: I would have to work for him next summer. I didn’t even consider it. I
said I was finished with the junkyard, finished for life, and hung up.