The Names Sewn Inside the Collars

The weekends

School started on a Wednesday in the middle of August. The girls wore their new things every day that first week, and I washed them every night so nobody would have to repeat.

Travis’s first weekend was the Friday after school started. I packed each girl a duffel bag with two outfits, pajamas, a church dress, and a toothbrush.

I packed the new clothes because those were the clothes they had now.

When they came home that Sunday, Brynn’s gray hoodie wasn’t in her bag.

I asked, and she said she thought she left it on Daddy’s couch, and I let it go, because things get left on couches.

Two weeks later, it was the jeans. And two shirts of Callie’s, one with a rainbow and one with the word “kindness” printed across the front in glitter that came off on everything.

By the middle of September, on the third of his weekends, the girls came home missing Callie’s leggings, two more of Brynn’s shirts, the second pair of Brynn’s jeans, and Callie’s pink hoodie with the cat on the pocket.

I sat down at the kitchen table that night and did the math off the back of the envelope.

With the sneakers that came home fine and the socks I’d quit counting, it was $340 worth of school clothes that had gone to Travis’s house and stayed.

Every time, he said the same thing. “They outgrew them, Jess.” Or, “I put a bag together for the church sale.” Or, once, “I don’t know, maybe at the laundromat,” like the laundromat ate shirts.

The girls didn’t outgrow anything in six weeks. Callie still wore the pajamas my mother bought her last Christmas, and they still had room in the legs.

Why I didn’t call him

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it every night. Why not pick up the phone and tell him to bring the clothes back?

Here is the plain answer. The clothes were at his house, on his weekend, and every phone call Travis and I had in two years ended in shouting, with at least one of the girls in earshot on one end or the other.

The last time I tried to call him about something, it was a dentist bill.

He put me on speaker in the truck without telling me, and the girls were in the back seat, and Brynn heard her father call her mother a word I won’t write down here.

She didn’t speak to either of us for the whole drive home.

When she got in the house, she went straight to her room, and I found her later sitting on her bed with her shoes still on, staring at the wall.

So no. I wasn’t going to call him and start it again.

I wasn’t going to make my girls carry their own clothes back and forth like evidence, either. They were children. The clothes were supposed to be the easy part.

I thought about calling his mother, June. June goes to our church and loves those girls more than anybody alive except me.

But June has a bad heart, and I didn’t want to be the reason it got worse.

I thought about the child support office. He was two months behind, $1,280, and I had let it ride because I could still make it work, and because I knew the minute I filed, there would be a phone call, and the phone call would be the speaker in the truck again.