The Sign She Held At The Fence
“It’s just the ceremony,” he said, fast. “You’ll be at the supper after. Mom’s doing brisket at her place. And the fence is right there, people are going to be all along it. Coach said you can see better from the fence than the top row anyhow.”
“Then I’ll see fine,” I said.
I wrote the check. Harlan Creek Senior Class, one hundred eighty dollars and no cents. I tore it out along the line and held it out to him with the order form.
He did not take it right away.
“I can ask Mom to pay half,” he said.
“It’s already wrote,” I said. “Turn it in Monday. They need your head size, I put seven and three eighths, you check that before you hand it over.”
He took it then. He folded the check inside the form and stood there another second.
“Shelly,” he said.
“Go on,” I said. “You’re going to be late to Dustin’s.”
He went. I heard his truck start, and I heard it sit in the driveway a long time before it backed out.
I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at my checkbook register. I am a home health aide. I make fourteen dollars and fifty cents an hour, and I do not get paid for the miles between houses. A hundred and eighty dollars is better than a day and a half of lifting people who cannot lift themselves.
I wrote the number in the register and got the subtraction wrong twice.
I should tell you about Kim, because it would be easy to make her the villain, and she was not one.
Kim was twenty years old when Trevor was born and twenty-two when she left. I did not know her then. She went to Amarillo to her parents and then somewhere past Amarillo, and for a long time there was a card at Christmas with no return address and sometimes not even that.
I met Rick at the county barn, of all places. He was a mechanic for the road district, still is, and I had a flat on the highway side of my car and a client waiting on me. He changed it in the gravel lot in about four minutes and would not take a dime. There was a little boy sitting in the cab of his pickup with a juice box, watching me through the glass like I was a television.
That was Trevor. He was three. He had on one shoe.
“He does that,” Rick said. “Takes the left one off. I don’t know why.”
I found out why. The left one pinched. He had gone up half a size and his daddy, who could rebuild a road grader’s transmission in a weekend, had not thought to press a thumb down on the toe of a child’s sneaker.
I am not telling that to make Rick small. He was a young man alone with a baby and a full-time job. I am telling it because that was the first thing I ever did for Trevor Dawson. I bought him a pair of shoes that fit, nine dollars at the Dollar General, with a dinosaur on the strap.
I married his father when Trevor was four. He carried the rings down the aisle of the First Baptist on a pillow my aunt made, and halfway down he stopped and took off his left shoe, and the whole church laughed, and I knew I was home.