The Boy I Covered By Noon
The drive I did not make
I passed the turn that goes out to the apartments by the ball field, where Brad lives now. I knew his truck would be in the lot because he does the early route and comes home mid-morning. I could have turned. I could have been standing in his living room in four minutes flat.
Tiffany would have been there. She moved in over the summer. She is twenty-nine and she manages the tanning place in the strip mall and she is not a cruel person, I do not think, she is just a person who got what she wanted and did not count what it cost somebody else’s kid.
I kept driving. The counter-move was not in that living room. It was eleven miles up the road in a beige office with a woman named Lorna in it.
I dropped Cole at the middle school. He got out and then he leaned back in through the door.
“You good, Mom?”
“I am great,” I said, which was a lie, but it was the right lie. “Go learn something. Love you.”
“Love you.” He shut the door and jogged up to where Marcus was waiting on the step, and the two of them went in without looking back, and I sat there one more second watching the doors close behind my boy.
Then I drove to the plant.
Lorna in HR
The pork plant does not look like anything from the road. Low gray buildings, a water tower, a parking lot full of trucks with mud flaps. I have worked there since I was twenty-seven. I know the smell and I do not smell it anymore, which my sister says is the saddest sentence she ever heard.
The HR office is up a set of metal stairs off the break area. Lorna has been the benefits clerk as long as I have been there. Reading glasses on a beaded chain, a candy dish she keeps filled with the good butterscotch, a photo of her grandkids thumbtacked crooked to the cork wall.
“Dawn,” she said, surprised, because I was supposed to be on the floor. “You lost?”
“Lorna, I need help and I need it today.”
She took the glasses off the chain and put them on. “Sit down. Tell me.”
So I told her. Cole, the pharmacy, the terminated card, the four hundred and eleven dollars, the three days Mr. Ngo floated me. I told it in order and I did not cry, because I had cried already and this was the part where you do not cry, this is the part where you fill out forms.