The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

The backpacks and the jeans and the light-up shoes, call it five hundred more.

And when I finally let myself drive past her place, slow, like a coward, I saw the brand-new tires on her Malibu. The little paper stickers still on the sidewalls.

I sat in my own truck at the stop sign and added it up out loud, the way my daddy taught me to add a feed bill.

Transmission money. My transmission money.

It had gone into a trampoline and school clothes and four tires. And, I would learn later, her overdue light bill and a birthday cake with a race car on it.

He had sat at my table with his hat in his hand and borrowed against a broke-down truck he never had one intention of fixing.

He had carried my money across the county line and spent it making another woman’s children happy.

I want to be honest about what that did to me. The anger came later, and it came quieter than you would think.

First it just hurt. A clean, deep hurt, like cutting yourself on something so sharp you do not feel it for a second.

I did not sleep right for a week. I would lie there and run it back, every Sunday he had been busy, every face-down phone, every excuse about the shop.

I kept thinking of him at the Co-op that first day, buying fence staples, smiling at me over the mineral tubs. I had thought a man who mended fence was a man who kept his word. That is a foolish thing to believe, but I believed it.

No Crime In It

My first mind was to call the law. That is everybody’s first mind.

But there is nothing in it for the law. I thought it through at my kitchen table, the same table, with the IOU unfolded in front of me.

He had not stolen from me. I had handed him the money across that oilcloth of my own free will.

A loan between a man and the woman he is courting is not a theft. It is not fraud you can prove.

No deputy in this county was going to drive out to a doublewide over a girlfriend loan and a trampoline. I knew that before I ever picked up the phone, so I set the phone back down.

I thought about small claims over in the county seat. I even looked at what it cost to file.

But that is a slow, paper way to be right. Months of it.

And at the end a judge tells a man he owes you money he has already spent. Then you are still standing in a parking lot trying to collect from a man with nothing.