I didn’t say it then. I didn’t say it at dinner.
I said it, finally, sitting at my own kitchen table at thirty-two, three weeks after the Sunday roast, with a cup of tea I’d let go cold and a folder I’d found in my old email account that I hadn’t looked at since I was nineteen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Promise Before Enrollment
My senior year of high school, I was methodical about college in the way that kids are methodical when they’re trying to manage anxiety by managing information. I made spreadsheets. I compared programs. I asked the school counselor questions she’d clearly never been asked before, because she kept having to look things up.
I was interested in healthcare — not medicine exactly, but the operational side of it. How clinics ran. How patient flow worked. Why some practices ran efficiently and some didn’t. I’d read about health administration almost by accident, as a sophomore, in an article about hospital management, and something in it clicked.
The programs I was looking at would take four years and cost, at the cheaper state school options, somewhere between forty and fifty thousand dollars total. With the thirty-six thousand my parents had promised plus grants and part-time work, I thought I could get there without borrowing much. Maybe without borrowing at all.
I was doing careful math. The math depended on the thirty-six thousand.
I have, still, in a folder in my Gmail account labeled “school stuff 2010,” an email from my mother dated September of my senior year. I found it three weeks after that Sunday dinner, because Sophie told me to look, and I looked because I was tired of having only my own memory and my parents’ reconstruction to compare.