The Names Sewn Inside the Collars

Marketplace

On a Tuesday night near the end of September, after the girls were in bed, I stood at the kitchen counter with my phone to look for a used bike for Callie. Hers had a bent rim, and her birthday was coming.

I typed “girls bike” into Marketplace and set it for twenty miles.

The second row of listings was clothes, because Marketplace shows you whatever it wants. And there, in the middle of my screen, were Brynn’s dark jeans.

I knew them by the little embroidered star on the back pocket.

I knew them because I had ironed the patch back down after the first wash. The listing said “Girls 10, like new, worn twice, $8.”

The seller was Travis Hale. His own name, his own picture, the one from the lake with his sunglasses on his head.

He wasn’t even hiding it. I think that was the part that made me sit down on the kitchen floor.

I clicked on his profile. He had nine listings up. Brynn’s gray hoodie for $10. Callie’s leggings in a lot of two for $6.

The kindness shirt, the rainbow shirt, the cat hoodie. A pair of work boots that were his, and a tackle box.

The pictures were all taken on his couch, on that brown plaid blanket his mother crocheted for us when we got married.

I recognized the blanket before I recognized half the clothes. That’s how you know you’ve been married to somebody.

I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet under the sink for a long time.

The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the road a dog was going at something in a ditch.

I wasn’t angry, exactly. I’ve thought about that a lot since. Angry would have been easier. What I was, mostly, was tired, and a little scared, because I didn’t understand it.

Travis made decent money at the plant in Decatur. He’d been there eleven years. He wasn’t the kind of man who sold his children’s shirts for eight dollars. At least, he hadn’t been.

The spools

My grandmother taught me to sew when I was eight. She kept her thread in a wooden box, and when she died, my mother gave me every spool because nobody else in the family would know what to do with them. I keep them now in a clear plastic box with a snap lid.

When I was a girl and went to church camp every summer, Grandma sewed my name into everything I took. Every sock. Every towel.

She said, “Things that know whose they are find their way home.” I always thought it was the kind of thing grandmothers say.

Sitting on that kitchen floor, I thought about those little letters in my camp towels. Nobody ever took anything of mine at camp.

Not because the counselors checked, but because nobody wants to be seen wearing another girl’s name.

I didn’t want to catch Travis. I want to be clear about that, because people have asked me since.

I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the town. I wanted my girls’ clothes to come home, and I wanted it done without one more fight.

If he was going to sell them, at least they would say whose they were. Whoever bought them would know they were Brynn’s and Callie’s.

And maybe, I thought, Travis would see the names when he folded them for the picture, and he would stop.

The next day at lunch I drove to the Walmart in Lincoln and bought replacements for what I could afford.

Two pairs of jeans on clearance, three shirts, a pair of leggings. Sixty-eight dollars. It came out of the light bill money, and I figured I’d sort out the light bill later.

That night after supper, I got out Grandma’s spools.