Being an undergraduate at college at my age took some adjusting to. I wasn’t just a girl, I was a married woman, not worth even the scarcest amount of attention from the young men. I moved through the campus as if I was invisible, and in the classes the professors rarely called on me when I raised my hand—perhaps because some were younger than me. There were two other girls in pre-vet in my year, and while they lived on campus and spent their social hours dating or going to coffee houses, the three of us studied together and commiserated on the lack of assistance we received from professors and fraternities. After two years of pre-vet I had enough credits to apply for veterinary school. My grades were some of the highest, but still the interview committee sat me down and asked me why exactly I wished to be a vet. ‘You’re married with children?’ one committee member asked.

‘Yes, but they all support me,’ I said.

‘It’s fairly late in life to enter the profession,’ another said, as though I was hobbling around on a cane.

‘By the time I graduate I figure I’ll have at least twenty good years of practice ahead of me. And there’s not much else I’d rather be doing.’

The men looked at me over their spectacles. I didn’t look away.

That autumn I began my first year of veterinary school, in a class with three other women. By now the children were used to making their own school lunches, to coming home to an empty house, to helping me fold the laundry, chop the vegetables for dinner and cook simple things—tomato soup from a can; macaroni and cheese—when I was busy studying. I worried about their nutrition sometimes but they didn’t stop growing weedy and tall, Jim’s height in their genes. They spoke longingly of mothers who made cookies for their children when they came home from school, mothers who helped with science fairs and volunteered for the PTA. I told them, then, about my mother. How she sometimes took to her room for days with headaches. How when I was a girl there were times I couldn’t go to school because the farm work had to be done.

‘I wish you’d at least come to the Christmas concert,’ Caroline pleaded. ‘I have a solo on the violin.’