The Names Sewn Inside the Collars
How we got here
Travis and I had been divorced for two years by then. We were married for nine.
I was twenty-one when we got married at my grandmother’s church, and he was twenty-three and could fix anything with an engine in it.
He wasn’t a cruel man when I married him. I want to say that plainly, because it matters to how the rest of this goes.
He was a hard worker who came home tired and didn’t know what to do with his hands when they were empty.
What broke us was mostly money and mostly yelling. The yelling came from both of us, if I am honest, though I quit doing it about a year before he did.
When we fought, the girls heard it through every wall of that rental house.
The night I knew it was over, Callie was five. Travis and I got going in the kitchen about a phone bill, of all things, and when it was done I found her curled up asleep in the dry bathtub with her blanket, because it was the farthest room from the noise.
I filed the next month. We split things down the middle, which in our case meant he got the truck and the debt on the truck, and I got the girls during the week and a car with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it.
The court set child support at $640 a month. He got every other weekend, Friday at six to Sunday at six, and a Wednesday supper when his shifts allowed it, which was not often.
I work as a teller at the bank on Main Street in our town.
It’s a small town in central Illinois, about three thousand people, a grain elevator you can see from anywhere, and four churches for a Catholic, a Methodist, a Baptist and the rest of us.
Teller pay is not much. I make about thirty-one thousand a year, and with the support check I could keep the lights on, keep the girls fed, and keep a little something aside if I was careful. I was careful.
Starting the first week of June, I put twenty dollars a week in an envelope in the back of my Bible for school clothes.
By the end of July I had a little over two hundred. My mother gave me a hundred for the girls’ birthdays, and I worked two Saturdays at the bank’s drive-up window.
By August I had $540, and I spent $520 of it. I can still tell you every piece, because I wrote it on the back of the envelope.
I’m a teller. I count things. It’s how I sleep at night.
For Brynn, who was nine and in the fourth grade: two pairs of jeans, a pair of leggings, a gray hoodie with a zipper, and six shirts, because she wanted one for every school day and one for church.
For Callie, who was seven and starting second grade: two pairs of jeans, two pairs of leggings, a pink hoodie with a cat on the pocket, and six shirts, including the little purple one with the buttons at the collar that she picked out herself.
Socks and underwear for both, a pair of sneakers each, and two packs of hair ties because those disappear no matter whose house they live in.
Kohl’s in Bloomington for most of it, the Walmart in Lincoln for the rest.
I took the girls for ice cream after. We sat on the curb outside the Dairy Queen, and Callie got chocolate all down her front, and I didn’t even care, because none of it was on the new clothes yet.