Waltz of Her Life

When Hayley found out that out-of-state tuition was nearly double the in-state admission, everyone put their heads together and came up with an innovative solution. The week after Hayley graduated high school, Linda and Stephen rented a trailer for all her furniture, her clothes, her computers, and her knick-knacks and moved her three hundred miles away.

She lived with her grandparents from the end of May through the following December, which qualified her to apply for admission to the university as an in-state student in January, when she began her college career.

Even for an in-state student, the tuition figure shocked Linda. She and Stephen had managed to save over $40,000 in Hayley's college fund by the time she started, that January of 2008. They decided to release $10,000 of it to Hayley at the beginning of each academic year, and she would have to provide the rest, through the scholarships she'd won, money she'd made at the video store and through babysitting, and loans she took out for the rest. "Kid, you have it way tougher than I ever did," Linda had told her more than once.

As the speakers droned on through their congratulatory speeches, Linda's mind wandered on a tapestry of her daughter's life, from that day she'd driven her to kindergarten, seventeen years ago. Even thinking about that incident caused her eyes to mist over, as she held her five-year-old daughter in her arms one last time, to be released into the world for an education in the formal and informal senses.

There were the arts and craft projects she'd brought home, such as her crayoned drawing of a turkey during Thanksgiving, which Linda proudly placed on the refrigerator door. As she progressed through the lower grades, Linda held bright, colorful birthday parties in the house for Hayley and seven of her little friends. They would squeal and babble loudly while Stephen rigged up a piñata and other games for them to play.

Through it all, Stephen and Linda spent hours in front of the television playing the Nintendo and Playstation games that came as birthday or Christmas presents. Linda would patiently help Inge cook and clean while beeping and roaring sounds emanated from the entertainment room.

The normal troubled teen phase occurred, of course, starting with Hayley's insistence on getting a computer of her own. Though the computer was a portable laptop and she could have played/worked on it anywhere in the house, Hayley would spend hours on it in her bedroom, while talking on her phone with her friends. Linda worried about everything: that Hayley would rack up hundreds of dollars in online purchases, that online predators would stalk her though all the social media sites she frequented, or that she'd simply get fat from the sedentary life of a web surfer and computer game player.