The Last Friday I Ever Sent

There were three winters in that stretch, and I remember them now the way you remember anything by what broke.

The first winter, our furnace at home needed a part, forty some dollars, and I put off ordering it for two weeks because the Friday transfer had already gone out and the account was thin until the next paycheck. We ran space heaters in the hallway instead and told Zach it was a camping game.

The second winter, Zach outgrew his snow boots in January, which is the worst possible month in northern Michigan to need new boots, and I bought a size too big at the resale shop on Route 12 so they would last him through March, and stuffed the toes with an extra pair of socks so he would not trip.

The third winter, Will’s coat sleeve tore at the shoulder seam from reaching too far into a bucket truck one too many times, and he wore it another eight months with the seam safety pinned shut rather than mention it, because he already knew what buying a new one that month would mean giving up somewhere else.

None of these were disasters. That is the part I want to be clear about. We were never truly in danger. We were only ever a little bit behind, a little bit patched, a little bit making do, in the specific, grinding way that never shows up on the outside and never quite stops either. My parents, meanwhile, always sounded, on the phone, exactly one bill away from losing everything, every single week, for three straight years.

Turning eight

Zach’s birthday fell on a Saturday in June, and I had been planning it since April the way you plan the one thing you can actually control.

I strung dollar store banners along the porch rail myself, on a stepladder, because the birthday budget did not stretch to a party store banner with his actual name on it. I made the cake, chocolate with blue frosting swirled on top, because Zach had informed me with total confidence that blue was “the only good flavor of frosting,” which is not a sentence that makes sense and which I loved him for anyway. I set up a folding table under the maple tree for hot dogs and a cooler of pop packed in ice that would be soup by two in the afternoon no matter what I did.

Twelve kids came from his class and his Scout troop. A couple of the dads stood by the grill talking about the high school football team’s chances that fall, the way men in Alder Creek talk about Friday night lights the way other places talk about weather. Will manned that grill himself, still in the shirt he’d worn to work that morning, because a co-worker had offered to cover his call out shift so he would not miss this one.

Zach spent the morning helping me blow up balloons until we both got lightheaded, then spent twenty minutes deciding exactly where the porch banner should hang, an inch to the left, then back again, with the seriousness of a man reviewing blueprints. He asked me four separate times if I was sure Grandma and Grandpa knew it started at one o’clock and not at two, and I told him yes each time, because I believed it each time.

My mother had called that Wednesday to confirm.

“We wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “You know we wouldn’t miss Zach’s birthday.”

I believed her. I want that on the record, because I think the believing is its own kind of evidence. I had spent three years training myself to believe her every Friday morning, and I did not know how to stop training for one Saturday in June.