The Oak Table That Paid for Her Braces

A photo from the lake. A brand-new Jet Ski, red and white, the dealer sticker still on the side of it.

Shane standing in the water up to his knees with his hand on the handlebar, grinning like a kid.

Kristy was sitting on the back of it in big sunglasses and a pink swimsuit cover-up. She looked happy. I’ll give her that. She looked like a woman who thought she was being treated well.

Under it, Shane had written two words. “Summer goals.”

Forty-one people had liked it. His cousin had commented with three fire emojis.

I sat there with the phone in my lap for a long time. The eggs went cold on the coffee table.

Then I heard Maddie’s door open down the hall, and her bare feet on the carpet, and she came and stood at the end of the couch.

She didn’t say anything. She just held up her phone so I could see she was looking at the same picture.

Maddie follows her dad. Of course she does. She follows both of us, and her aunts, and half the town, and she reads everything. Every word.

“It’s okay,” she said. Her voice was so small. “It’s his money.”

“Come here,” I said, and she folded herself down onto the couch next to me the way she used to when she was little, all elbows and knees, and put her head on my shoulder.

We didn’t talk about it. We watched a cooking show neither of us cared about. When she laughed at the host dropping a cake, her hand went up over her mouth, and I felt it like a splinter.

After she went to bed, I thought about all the things I could do.

I could comment under his picture. Something short and polite and deadly, the kind of line every woman in town would screenshot and pass around by breakfast.

I had about six of them written in my head before I even stood up.

But my daughter reads every word both of us put online. I was not going to make her watch her parents fight in public, under a picture of a Jet Ski, with forty-one people looking on.

I could call the county. Our support order was on file, and there is a way to ask them to enforce the medical and dental split. My sister went through it with her ex in Faribault.

It took her five months. Five months of forms and phone calls and waiting on hold, and in the end she got her money in pieces of twenty-three dollars at a time out of his paycheck.

Dr. Halvorsen had a Monday opening. We had already pushed it back twice, once for my car’s transmission and once for a volleyball tournament. If I let it go again, the next slot was the middle of October.

I was not making that girl wait five more months to smile.

So I sat down at the dining table with a cup of decaf and a calculator, the same way I had sat there a hundred times before, and tried to find $600 that I did not have.

I found about $210. That was the truth of it. Between the electric bill and the car insurance and school supplies and the sneakers she’d outgrown, I could find $210 by Friday and not one dollar more.

I put the calculator down and laid both my hands flat on the table.

It was solid oak. Not veneer, not particle board with a wood-look top.