The Man in Row Three

The split

Shayla and I came apart when Ava was six. I am not going to lay all of it at her feet. I worked long hours, and I came home tired and quiet, and she wanted somebody who talked more than I did.

I wasn’t always easy to live with. She wasn’t either.

We sat at the kitchen table one night in March and agreed it was over, and we both cried, and then we talked about Ava for two hours.

We agreed I would still see her every other weekend and Wednesday nights. Nothing was written down for that. We weren’t fighting, so it didn’t seem like we needed a judge to tell us how to be decent.

That was the second mistake I made, after not adopting her.

Since I wasn’t her father on paper, I didn’t owe child support. I knew that. Shayla knew that. She was working at a dental office by then, answering phones, and she was renting a little two-bedroom on the east side of town, and I knew what that rent was.

So I wrote her a check for seven hundred dollars on the first of every month. I wrote “Ava” on the memo line.

Nobody asked me to and nobody made me. I just could not picture my girl going without something because of a decision two grown-ups had made at a kitchen table.

Shayla cashed every one of them. For a year and a half, seventeen checks, she cashed them, and for most of that time I got my weekends and my Wednesdays, and I thought we were doing better than most people.

Kyle

Shayla met Kyle the winter Ava was seven. He was a few years older than her and worked nights for the railroad, switching cars at the yard.

I met him exactly once that first year, in the parking lot of a pizza place when I was dropping Ava off.

He shook my hand. It was a firm handshake, and he looked me in the eye, and I remember thinking he seemed all right. I am not going to make him out to be some cartoon.

He was a working man who loved a woman who came with a little girl and an ex-husband who would not go away.

The weekends started getting canceled in the spring. Ava had a cold. Ava had a sleepover. Kyle’s mother was in town.

By June I was seeing her one Wednesday a month if I was lucky, and the checks kept going out on the first, and Shayla kept cashing them.

I asked Shayla about it once, on the phone. She got quiet and then she said, “He just thinks it’s weird, Jake. A grown man calling her kiddo who isn’t her dad. He says she needs one family, not two.” I said she’d had one family for six years and I was in it. She hung up.

Later I found out a little more about why. Shayla’s own father had walked out when she was nine, and then Ava’s father had done the same thing to her at twenty-three.

She had been left twice before she was old enough to rent a car. She was terrified it would happen again.

Kyle was jealous of me, and Shayla was afraid of being alone, and she decided the cheapest way to keep him was to cut me out.

I don’t think she sat down and planned it like that. I think it was fear, one canceled weekend at a time, until the birthday.