The Man in Row Three

The night after

That night I sat at my own kitchen table with a cold supper and my checkbook. I had already written the check for September.

It was tucked in an envelope with her address on it, sitting by the door the way it always did.

People ask me why I didn’t go to court. I did look into it. A man I work with, Mike, had a brother who went through something close to it in Wichita, and the next week I drove up to Olathe and paid a family lawyer two hundred dollars for an hour of her time.

She was kind about it, but she did not dress it up. In Kansas a former stepparent who never adopted has almost no legal standing to see a child.

I could try to argue I had stood in as her parent, but it would take a year, cost more than I made, and maybe lose.

And even if I won, she said, I would win it on a witness stand with Ava’s mother on the other side. Ava would hear about it, she said. Kids always do.

I drove home from Olathe and knew I wasn’t going to do it. I would not put that girl in the middle of a fight she never asked for.

Whatever I did, it had to be something she would never have to choose a side over.

So I tore up the September check. That much I could do. I wasn’t going to keep paying rent on a house I wasn’t allowed to stand in the doorway of.

That money had been for Ava, and Ava wasn’t getting it anymore. Shayla and Kyle were.

But I sat there with the pieces of that check in front of me, and the money was still mine and still meant for her, and I started thinking about what Ava had wanted more than anything for as long as I’d known her.

Miss Renee

Ava had wanted to dance since she was four. She would put on Shayla’s old music and spin around the living room in socks until she fell down dizzy.

There was a little studio on Main Street with pink letters in the window, and every time we drove past it she pressed her face to the glass.

Shayla always said no. It cost too much, she said, and it did. I never pushed, because it wasn’t my call, and because I knew what a dental office paid.

But I knew Ava. I knew she’d still be pressing her face to that window.

The next Monday I left the shop at lunch with grease still on my hands and walked into that studio. The owner was a woman in her fifties named Renee, though every child in three counties called her Miss Renee, and she was sweeping the floor in a pair of old sneakers.

I told her the whole thing standing right there by the front desk. I told her I wasn’t Ava’s father and never had been on paper.

I told her about the birthday. I told her I wanted to pay for one full year of dance for Ava Price, and I wanted to know if she would take my money.

Miss Renee leaned on her broom and looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Does her mother know you’re doing this?” I said no, not yet, and that if her mother said no, I wouldn’t fight it, and she could give me my money back.