Pearl Snap

Education is the answer to our social woes, and not the get-a-good-job-after-high-school, but the deep plodding kind, the making- of-many-books kind, get-everybody- together-to-debate-the-big-questions

kind. When I’m in Walmart and some kid dangling by the wrist is screaming, his mom in shorts that slice her thighs saying something deep to him through her teeth, her long hair smelling like she has

more than one job, I know it’s not her fault. She’s carrying a combination wallet/ cigarette case with a pocket for the lighter. Her husband—well, the father of her last two, her divorce isn’t final from her ex— is waiting in the truck, a Ford. Her dad

had a problem with that until they went duck hunting and worked it out. Her man didn’t graduate even though his junior high let the boys go when trawling season began, but each year going back got harder.

She took typing and bookkeeping and even AP math. She says she manages a convenience store, where you learn how to just take on the present.

Right now she just needs to find that pearl snap for her oldest

and why is it suddenly so dang hard to find a boy’s twelve pearl snap? There’re a few like her in every cow town. When the copter brings a woman’s child—a certain woman of that kind— from the parish or the county

to the city, and we all stand around the trauma bay watching environmental services sweep up the gauze wrap and cut clothes, and that woman from the boonies is still not here, driving her husband’s truck as hard and steady as she can,

I’ll meet her in family consult or stand her in the shiny hallway— she’ll go anywhere—and depending on what the test tube intern has to say, she’ll either squat, lay her forearm against her stomach, and loose

that first wail-groan that defies conceit, or she’ll tutor me in the language of living in good faith, of staring down what I have to say and opening her mind to it, taking it in like a nursling and knowing it

whole until the two can sleep side by side. We tell her, it’s gonna be a long road, and she says, as long as there’s a road, I’m on it.