The Birthday Box on His Porch

It came to $541 with tax. I put it on my card and did not let myself think about my truck insurance coming due the next week, or about the five hundred I had already spent on the first one sitting broken in another man’s living room.

I bought a roll of brown kraft paper and a spool of blue ribbon on the way out.

The ribbon was blue, because blue has been Tanner’s color since he was two years old and refused to wear anything else.

I wrapped it in the parking lot with the box on the hood and the tape from my glove box, and tied the ribbon into a bow.

The wind kept trying to take the paper. I held it down with my elbows and got it done.

Then I sat in the cab with the box beside me and my hands on the wheel and thought about texting Cody back. Not the ugly thing. Something short. “On my way.”

I didn’t. I knew if I warned him, he would have hours to work out a story, and Tanner would get the story instead of the truth. I wanted my son to have the truth, whatever it was.

Highway 84

There is a way home to the Plains from Abilene that everybody out here knows. You take Highway 84 northwest through Roscoe and Snyder, then on to Post, and you climb the caprock, and the whole world goes flat.

I have driven it more times than I can count. For eight years I drove it every other Friday and every other Sunday, trading Tanner at the Whataburger in Post because it was about halfway and it was open and it was safe.

He used to fall asleep in the back seat with a Whataburger cup still in his hand. I would reach back at red lights and take it out of his fingers so it wouldn’t spill.

That Saturday I drove it alone with a wrapped box in the passenger seat and the radio off.

The cotton fields around Snyder were bare and brown, waiting on spring. The pump jacks were nodding away like they always are.

Somewhere past Snyder I ate one of the granola bars and drank half the water and started to feel human again. Past Post my eyes would not stay open, so I pulled into a gas station lot, put the seat back, and slept two hours with the box belted into the passenger seat. And then, because I had nothing to do but drive, I started thinking about Cody.

I met him when I was nineteen. He was working on a well service rig out of Snyder and I was in nursing school, and he had the nicest manners of any boy I had ever met. He called my mother ma’am until the day we divorced.

We were married at twenty and twenty-two. Tanner came when I was twenty-five. For a few years we were the kind of tired, happy couple you see in every church nursery on a Sunday morning.

Then the oil prices fell the way they do out here, and Cody got laid off, and got hired, and got laid off again.

Every time it happened he got a little quieter. By the end he hardly talked at all.

I don’t blame the oil field for our divorce. We had our own troubles, and some of them were mine.