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All My Belongings

By Cynthia Ruchti

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The coffee tasted like burnt marshmallows. The jet-black charred part. Jayne set the vending machine cup on the corner of her advisor’s desk.
Patricia smiled over her half-glasses. “Don’t blame you.” She nodded toward her oversized thermal tankard. “I bring my own from home.”
Home.
“I’m surprised you wanted to see me today, Jayne. Aren’t they—?”
“Yes.” She directed her line of sight through Patricia Connor’s office window, over the tops of the century-old oaks and maples lining the campus, toward the courthouse in the center of town.
“And you didn’t want to be there?” The woman removed her glasses as if they interfered with her understanding.
Oh, I’m there. I’ve been there every agonizing moment. Several little shards of me are embedded in the hardwood floor in the courtroom. What’s left of me wants an answer from you. “It’s important I find out if I can reenter the nursing program where I left off.”
Patricia leaned back in her nondescript office chair. “And you have to know today.”
“Yes.”
Her advisor’s head shook so slightly, Jayne assumed the movement originated in the nervous bounce of her knee, not her neck. “We’ve had…concerns.”
“My grades were good.”
“It’s not that. Most nontraditional students are committed enough to pull decent grades.”
Twenty-five and nontraditional. In every way. Jayne leaned forward. “And work two jobs while doing it.” She wouldn’t look out the window again. Her future lay here, in this decision. “If you’re worried about the financial aspect…”
“Aren’t you? Word is you’re tapped out with what your family’s gone through.”
She’d shelved the word family a year and a half ago, the day she found out her father’s middle name was Reprehensible. Bertram Reprehensible Dennagee. Her mother didn’t think she could endure the pain one more day. Her father made sure she didn’t.
According to the charges against him, it wasn’t the first time.nThanks to Jayne, though, it was the first time he’d been caught. Her eyes burned behind her eyelids. She could feel her sinuses swelling.
“Jayne?”
She repositioned herself in the chair, dropping her shoulders from where they’d crept near her ears, straightening her spine, breathing two seconds in, two seconds out. “I’ll find a way. I need to finish the nursing program. Get on with my life. What’s left of it.”
Behind her a voice leaned into the room. “Did you hear? Guilty! They got him!”
Patricia’s face blanched and pinched. Her eyes made arrows toward where Jayne sat.
The voice backed into the hall. The expletive a whisper, it still rattled the window, the bookcases, Jayne’s ribs.
Lips pressed together, she waited for her advisor to say something.
“I’m sorry.”
“About the verdict? Not unexpected.”
“Have you thought about trying another school of nursing? Someplace a little farther away from—”
From her father’s reputation? How far was that?


I.C.E. In case of emergency. Geneva’s name and code showed on her cell phone screen. Jayne hadn’t turned the key in the ignition yet, twenty minutes after leaving Patricia’s office. Perfectly save to use her cell phone even though she was behind the wheel. Safe. If had been anyone but Geneva, the mentor who’d kept her tethered to reality since Jayne was eleven-years-old and practically orphaned, she wouldn’t have thought so.
Deep breath. Have to talk. “Hello?”
“Where are you?”
“Depths of despair. Where are you?”
Geneva’s smile registered through the phone. “You maintain that sense of humor, Jayne. Don’t know how you do, but it’s going to keep you upright. That and the God of the Universe who holds you in the palm of His—”
“I couldn’t go to the court house.”
“I’m here now. The reporters are going nuts looking for you.”
Jayne slid her hand down the side of the seat and flicked the lever to move her farther from the constraints of the steering wheel. “I don’t think I can go back to my apartment. They’ll be waiting for me.”
“It’s what they do.”
“‘So, Ms. Dennegee, how does it feel to know your father’s headed for prison because of you?’ ‘Fine. Thanks for asking.’”
“He’s going to prison because of his own sins, Jayne, not yours.”
“Is that what you tell all the snitches?”
“You did the right thing. You did the only thing you could do. What kind of guilt would you bear right now if you hadn’t turned him in?”
The temperature in the car peaked somewhere between preheat and broil. She reached across the seat to roll down the passenger side window. Cross ventilation proved a false hope on a corn-ripening day in Iowa. “He’s my daddy.”
The word she vowed not to use again.
“Hon”—Geneva cleared her throat—“sometimes the bravest thing we can do is let the guilt go.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Don’t hold yours.”
“What?”
“Keep breathing.”
“It’s not automatic anymore.” Jayne rested her forehead on the steering wheel. If it left a mark, so be it. She’d been branded by her parents’ “Projects.” What was one more deformity?
“Jayne, let me come get you. Where are you?”
“Parking Lot B at the university.”
“What are you doing there? Oh.”
“That was a scene you’ll find amusing. Imagine hearing the final verdict from the TA who bops in with the good news, not knowing the convict’s daughter is sitting in the room.”
Geneva’s pause communicated a paragraph of concern. “When do you start?”
“School? Never. Not here anyway. I would make the administration ‘uncomfortable’ to deal with the press. What Dad did with his pharmacy degree isn’t going to make it into the college recruitment brochure. My name would apparently poison the student roster. Can you imagine roll call? ‘Davis? Denmark? Dennagee?’ Then gasps followed by silence.”
“I always said drama was your gift. Don’t know why you chose nursing rather than the theater. But we can rehash that later. Let me pick you up. We’ll go out to the lake. Give the press a chance to lose interest in you.”
“Buffy’s Brats ‘n’ Stuff is expecting me for the four-to-midnight shift.”
Geneva’s sigh could have moved a Richter needle well beyond six point five. “Call. In. Sick. Good grief. Of all days, this would be the day to call in sick.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Then call in Done.”
“Geneva! Aren’t you the one who always preached responsibility?”
“At this point, I don’t think you can afford to stay at a place that shrivels your soul.”
“I did for most of my childhood.”

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