The Week I Camped Across the Lake

The Promise That Was Never Worth the Paper

I should tell you how we got there, because Brent did not become this man in one phone call.

Amy and Brent married young and split when Sophie was three. By the time I met Amy at a cookout at her cousin’s place in Kannapolis, Sophie was five, and Brent had already moved to Concord with a new job at a distribution warehouse.

The court gave him every other weekend and Wednesday supper. It also set his child support, four hundred and ten dollars a month, and to be fair to the man, that money came through the state every month like clockwork. Brent paid. He just did not show.

He always had a reason. A double shift. A truck that would not start. A cold.

Sophie kept a calendar on her wall with his weekends marked in blue marker, and every Friday that he did not come, she took a pencil and drew one small line through the blue.

She never said anything about it. She just drew the line. I watched her do it maybe forty times before I stopped counting, and I will tell you, there were nights I went out to the shop behind our house and sanded a board for an hour just so I would not pick up the phone.

But Brent was her father, and I was not, and Amy and I had agreed from the start that I would never be the one to tear him down in front of her. So I kept my mouth shut and I kept showing up.

The camp was Sophie’s idea before it was anybody’s. Her occupational therapist told us about it the year before, a week-long sleepaway camp on Kerr Lake, up near the Virginia line, built for kids on the autism spectrum.

It cost two thousand dollars for the week. There was some help available, but we made just a little too much on paper to get much of it.

Amy’s a nurse and I’m a teacher. We do fine. We do not do two thousand dollars in one check fine.

So at Easter dinner at his mother’s house, when Sophie announced to the whole table that she was going to camp in June, Brent said it right out loud. “Daddy’s got it, bug. Don’t you worry. That one’s on me.”

Everybody heard it. His mother heard it. Kayla heard it. Sophie heard it, and she wrote “Dad pays” on the brochure in pencil, in small careful letters, right under the price. I saw it there every time she unfolded it.

People have asked me since why we did not just make him pay. The answer is simple.

It was a promise, not a court order, so there was nothing to make him pay. A father’s word at Easter dinner is not something you can take to anybody.

Amy could have begged. She told me that night she would not. “I have spent eight years asking that man to show up,” she said. “I am not going to ask him to show up with his checkbook too.”

The camp wanted the full balance by check-in. That gave us five days.