With a few hours to kill before we had to take my father to the airport and the sun hanging high on a perfect Chapel Hill day, we agreed to take a ride for ice cream with a quick stop at the local bookstore.
My old man decided weeks before that he was going to go back and read each of the classic stories that he’d skipped out on in college. He was working his way through Moby Dick but wanted to get a copy of Heart of Darkness for his next assignment.
At the bookstore he explained to Emily, as he had to me a million times before, that he was not a reader in college. He described the arrangement he had with my mother, a voracious reader with a fear of numbers, math, and science: he did all of her science and math work, while she read all of the required books for their English classes and explain them to him over coffee. Then she would write his English and lit papers.
“Em,” he said, pausing with a pensive laugh as he stared into the distance, envisioning his early relationship, “a lot of our science lab tests were done in stations. We’d walk around the classroom and at each station there’d be a question or a problem to solve. Everyone had a sheet of paper with numbers that corresponded to the station and you’d write your answer down on each line. Before we went into the test, I tear up a bunch of tiny sheets of paper and shove them in my pocket. Mom would always get directly behind me in line for these stations and I would write the answers down on the paper in my pocket and hide them beneath the questions at each station for her to find. That’s how she passed her science requirements.
“Which is why I never read any of these books,” he said. “Susan read them all for me.”
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