The Chair at Signing Day

Sue Ann had her camera halfway to her face when the library door opened behind me. I felt the cold come in before I saw who brought it.

It was 8:32 on a Tuesday morning in February. The wind off the Panhandle was doing what it does in February, and it pushed a little skiff of grit across the carpet before the door swung shut.

Rick walked in like he had been invited. He had on a brown canvas jacket so new the fold lines still showed across the chest, and his hair was cut short and combed wet.

He did not look at me. He looked at the table.

The table was one of the long library tables pushed up front by the magazine rack, with a white cloth over it that the cafeteria ladies had loaned us. On it sat a black ballpoint pen, a blue folder, and a small felt pennant from a college up in Kansas that most people in our town had never heard of until that winter.

Behind the table sat my son. Caleb was eighteen, in the only collared shirt he owned that still fit across his shoulders, and he was trying hard not to grin.

The chair beside him was empty. Sue Ann had asked who wanted to sit with him, and in the little shuffle that followed, nobody had moved yet.

Rick moved.

He crossed the room in about six steps, pulled out that chair, and sat down in it. He put his arm along the back of Caleb’s chair like he had been doing it all his life.

“Get one of me and my boy,” he said to Sue Ann. Then he looked over at me for the first time and said, quieter, “Relax, Ang. It’s a picture.”

What seven years looks like

I want to tell you what went through my head in that moment, because I have thought about it a hundred times since.

The first thing was a number. Four hundred and ten dollars. That was what the judge in Amarillo set for child support when Rick and I divorced, when Caleb was ten years old and still sleeping with a night-light he pretended was for the dog.

Rick paid it for about eight months. Then he paid half of it twice. Then he stopped.

That was seven years ago. Seven years at $410 a month is $34,440, and I did not have to work that out with a pencil. I knew it the way you know your own phone number.

People who have never been through it always ask the same question. Why didn’t you make him pay? The state has a whole office for it.

The state does. I called them so many times the lady in the Amarillo office knew my voice. They found him twice. Once he was roofing in Clovis and once he was hauling water for an oilfield outfit outside Woodward, Oklahoma.

Both times he quit before the first check could be withheld. He worked cash after that, for whoever paid cash, and moved whenever somebody asked where he lived.

Every round of chasing him cost me days off at the dental office, gas to Amarillo, and a stomach that would not settle for a week. And every round came back with nothing in it.

When Caleb was thirteen, I sat in my car outside that office with a folder in my lap and decided I was done. Not done being owed. Done spending what little I had left on a man who would not be caught.

I would spend it on the boy instead.