The Names Sewn Inside the Collars

Everybody knew

I want to say I kept it quiet after that, and I did, mostly. I didn’t tell a soul.

But it turns out Darla wasn’t the only mom at our church who bought kids’ clothes on Marketplace.

Darla told her sister, who teaches the second grade Sunday school class, and her sister told two other moms at Wednesday night supper, because they had both bought girls’ clothes off Marketplace in September and they wanted to check.

That week, three church moms went home and checked their kids’ closets: Darla’s sister Lori, Kim Barrett and Angie Moss.

Lori found nothing of ours. Kim found Callie’s rainbow shirt in her daughter’s drawer. Angie found Brynn’s dark jeans with the star on the pocket.

Those two had no names in them, because they were sold before I ever opened the spools.

But both moms knew them anyway, from the first day of school picture I’d posted, the girls on the porch steps in their new things.

Angie brought the jeans by the bank on Thursday in a gift bag. The first gray hoodie never did come home. Somebody out there has it, and I hope it keeps her warm.

Kim brought the rainbow shirt to my house on Wednesday evening, with a plate of cookies on top like it was a casserole for a funeral.

She stood on my porch and said, “I’m sorry, Jessica. I had no idea.” And I said, “Neither did I, for a while.”

None of them asked for their money back. Not one. And none of them said a mean word about Travis to me, either.

I want that on the record, because it would have been easy for them to.

But a small town is a small town. By Friday, Travis’s mother knew.

June called him on her way home from Wednesday night supper, and from what I heard later, she didn’t yell. June doesn’t yell. She just said, “Travis, the whole church knows.”

I didn’t hear from him all week. I half expected the phone to ring and I was half dreading it.

I had the girls’ bags packed for his weekend on Thursday night, because I didn’t know what else to do but keep going the way we always did.

I put every piece with a name in it into those bags. Every one. I wasn’t going to start hiding their clothes from their father. They’re his girls too.