Chapter 3 - The Walk Across the Stage

Four years after I enrolled, I finished my last class. A seminar on twentieth-century American history, taught by a professor thirty years younger than me who'd once, without a hint of irony, asked me during office hours what it had actually been like to live through certain events he was only teaching from books. I told him. He listened like it mattered.

Graduation was on a warm Saturday morning in May, in the university's main arena, four thousand folding chairs and a sea of blue gowns. I sat in a section reserved for what the program called "non-traditional students," alongside Carol Ann and a handful of others our age or close to it, all of us grinning like fools in our caps.

I hadn't told my sons. There didn't seem to be a point. Three and a half years of silence tends to answer the question of whether somebody's coming.

When they called my name — Walter Bragg, Bachelor of Arts in History — I walked across that stage the way Eleanor used to walk down our front porch steps, careful but unhurried, taking her time because she'd earned the right to enjoy the walk. I shook the dean's hand. I took the folder with my diploma inside it. And as I turned to walk off the stage, I looked up at the arena's high ceiling and let myself believe, just for a second, that she was somewhere up there watching.

I finished it, Ellie, I thought. Whenever I was ready, just like you said.

The applause washed over the whole section as each of us walked, the way it does at every graduation, but when Carol Ann squeezed my hand afterward and said, "We did it, Walt," I felt something in my chest come loose that had been tight for four straight years.

That evening, tired down to my bones but happier than I'd been since before Eleanor got sick, I drove home with my cap still sitting on the passenger seat and my diploma resting in my lap at every red light, like I was afraid it might disappear if I let it out of my sight.

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I expected an empty house. A cup of coffee. Maybe I'd call Carol Ann later and we'd laugh about the whole thing over the phone.

Then I turned onto my street, and I hit the brakes so hard the seatbelt caught me across the chest.