I also spent time on hold with my student loan servicer, which is not a thing I was doing because of the wedding situation — I’d finished paying my loans at twenty-nine — but because a former Meadowfield classmate had texted asking whether I remembered the name of the grant program Ms. Delgado had used, because her younger sister was starting at a community college and she wanted to point her toward the right office. I remembered the name and found the program’s website and sent it along. The former classmate said thank you. I said Ms. Delgado was still there as far as I knew and was worth talking to directly.
I thought about that text for a while after I sent it. I’d told Ms. Delgado thank you when I graduated, sent a note to the financial aid office, but I hadn’t thought about her in years except as a piece of context when I told the story of how I’d funded school. She was a real person who’d put real time into finding money I needed. She’d done it for me and she was probably still doing it for other people.
The small acts that hold things together are often the ones nobody narrates.
The other thing that happened in those three weeks was that I called my cousin Jenna.
Jenna is my mother’s niece — my aunt’s daughter — and is thirty-five to my thirty-two. We are not close in the way of cousins who grew up near each other; she grew up in another state and we mostly saw each other at holidays. But she’d heard the scholarship story. She was one of the people my mother had mentioned the scholarship to, at a holiday several years back. I knew this because Jenna had said, warmly and sincerely, something about how impressive it was that I’d gotten such good funding.