The Letter Their Father Left Behind
I called Denny Fisk that December from the phone in my kitchen with a baby on each hip and the third one hollering in the other room, and I told him I was not coming to Cookeville. I told him I had three daughters now. He was quiet a long time. He was not a bad man. He said, June, that is a whole life you are signing up for, and I said yes it is, and he said, I cannot be the one to do it with you, and I said I know, and that was the end of the only time anybody ever almost married me. I do not tell that part to make you sad for me. I tell it so you know the price was real. I set down a life I wanted and I picked up a life I had not asked for, and I did it with my eyes open, in the kitchen, with the phone cord stretched across the room.
I kept my lunchroom job because it let me be home when the school buses ran. I took in sewing at night after the girls were down, hemming and mending and the occasional prom dress, working under a lamp until my eyes burned, and that sewing money is what bought three winter coats a year and three pairs of shoes that fit and, later, the SAT fees and the application fees and the little dorm refrigerator we drove to Cookeville in the back of a truck. I did not take a dime from Patricia. She offered once or twice, early, in a way that was really an offer to be thanked, and I said we were fine, and we were not fine, but we got by.
We got by because of a town. That is the true part nobody puts in these stories. The ladies at the church ran a diaper drive for a year without me asking. The man at the feed store, Earl Dyer, who I had known since I was a girl, started leaving the expired milk and bread on my porch instead of throwing it out, and he did it so quiet I never once had to say the word charity out loud. The girls’ kindergarten teacher, Miss Rhoda, kept three of everything in her classroom closet so my girls never had to be the ones who did not have the thing. When the triplets had chicken pox all three at once and I could not go to work, the lunchroom ladies covered my shifts and did not dock me. I raised those girls, but I did not raise them alone, and anybody who tells you a woman like me did it all by herself is selling something.