The Names Sewn Inside the Collars

Friday

He didn’t pull up in the drive and wait in the truck that Friday.

He parked it on the street, and he got out, and he walked up the porch steps, which he had never once done at this house.

He had a plastic bag in his hand from the Dollar General out on the highway.

He was still in his work clothes, the gray uniform shirt with his name over the pocket, and he hadn’t shaved.

I opened the door before he knocked. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

The girls came down the hall with their bags and stopped when they saw him on the porch instead of in the truck.

“Can I come in a minute?” he asked. “Just a minute, Jess. I’ll be quick.”

I looked at him for a long time. Then I stepped back and let him in.

He’d never been in this house. He looked around the little kitchen like he was trying to memorize it.

He sat down at the kitchen table, in my chair, the one by the plastic box of Grandma’s spools, which was still sitting on the end of the table because I hadn’t put it away. He looked at the box. Then he looked at the girls.

“Brynn. Callie. Come here a minute,” he said. They came and stood on either side of his chair, and Callie leaned on him the way she leans on me.

He set the bag on the table and opened it. It was socks.

Girls’ socks, the bright ones that come six pairs to a pack, two packs for each of them. Pink and purple for Callie, blue and green for Brynn.

“These are for you,” he said. “They’re brand new. Nobody’s ever worn them.” His voice did something on the last word, and he stopped and looked at the ceiling until it settled.

“Girls, I need to tell you something, and I need you to listen,” he said.

“Your clothes didn’t get too small. That wasn’t true. I sold them, because I needed gas money for work. And that was wrong of me, because they were yours. Your mama bought them for you.”

Callie looked at me, confused, and then back at him. Brynn didn’t look surprised at all.

She just put her hand on his shoulder, very light, like you’d touch a dog you weren’t sure about.

“I’m sorry,” he said to them. “I’m sorry I said you outgrew them. I won’t do it again. Not ever. If Daddy’s short on money, that’s Daddy’s problem to fix, not yours.”

Brynn said, “Okay, Daddy.” Just that. And then she hugged him around the neck, hard, and he put his face in her hair, and I had to turn around and look out the dark kitchen window for a while.

What he told me

When the girls had gone to put the socks in their bags, he stayed at the table. I sat down across from him.

It was the first time we’d sat at a table together without a lawyer or a fight in two years.

“They cut overtime at the plant in July,” he said. “Everybody. I was making sixty-two with overtime and now I’m making forty-four. I got behind on the truck, and then I got behind on you.”

“You could have told me,” I said. Not mean. I just said it.

“Every time I called you, we ended up yelling,” he said. “And it was mostly me. I know that. I didn’t want to call you and say I couldn’t pay, and hear you say what you’d have every right to say.”

“So you sold their clothes.”

“I told myself they had too much,” he said, and he looked down at the table.

“I told myself kids don’t need six shirts. I didn’t have six shirts. And then I’d fold them for the picture, and I’d see your stitching, and I’d feel sick. And I’d do it anyway.”

He told me Darla had come to find him on Wednesday. She’d gotten his number from June. He tried to pay her back the sixty dollars, and she wouldn’t take it from him either.

“She told me, ‘Buy those girls something that’s only theirs,'” he said. “So I did. It’s not much. It was twenty-four dollars. It’s what I had.”

He told me he’d started weekends at the tire shop out by the interstate, Saturday mornings, ten to two, which was why he’d be dropping the girls with June for a few hours on his weekends. I said that was fine. June would be over the moon.

“I’ll catch up the support,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you, it’s going to take till after Christmas. But I’ll catch it up. And I won’t touch their stuff again, Jess. You have my word.”

I believed him. I don’t know if that makes me foolish. But I had been married to that man for nine years, and I knew what he looked like when he was lying, and that wasn’t it.

“I’ll still pack their good clothes,” I told him. “I’m not going to send them over in rags to make a point. They’re your girls. They should look like somebody loves them at your house too.”

He nodded and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, and he said, “Somebody does.”