The Boy Who Crossed the Hangar First

School lunches and an inhaler

The first week was the hardest. Mason went to fourth grade at an elementary school on the west side of Junction City, and Courtney had never changed his emergency contacts. The school called her number twice before anybody called me.

I went in on my lunch break from the dental office with my hygiene scrubs still on and sat in the front office while a secretary named Mrs. Hall helped me fill out the forms. She did not ask a lot of questions. Ryan had signed a power of attorney for his kids before he shipped out, and she copied it.

She had been at a school next to an Army post for nineteen years, and she knew what a deployment does to a family.

“You’re the stepmom,” she said, writing.

“I’m the one who’s here,” I said.

She looked up at me over her glasses. Then she wrote my name in the box that said primary contact, and she did not cross anybody out, she just put me first.

I learned to pack lunches the way Mason liked them. Turkey, no cheese, cut in triangles not rectangles. A cheese stick on the side, because he wanted cheese, just not on the bread. Apple slices with lemon juice so they did not go brown. A note on a napkin, which he pretended he did not read.

I learned his inhaler schedule from the pharmacist at the store on Sixth Street, because Courtney had sent the inhaler but not the paperwork. The pharmacist called his pediatrician, and the pediatrician called me back, and by Friday I had a dosing chart on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like Kansas.

I learned that he was afraid of the dark in the hallway, not in his room. I learned that he would eat any vegetable if it was in soup. I learned he could not sleep if the closet door was open even an inch.

None of it was hard, exactly. I was working four days a week cleaning teeth, picking June up from daycare at five, picking Mason up from the after-school program at five-twenty, making supper, doing homework at the kitchen table, giving baths, and falling asleep on the couch with the TV on.

And every month, on the first, the money went to Courtney.

I knew because Ryan had given me his pay login before he left, and there it was every month on his statement. Child support, twelve hundred dollars. I would look at it on my phone in the parking lot of the dental office and then put the phone face down on the passenger seat and go back inside.