The Enchiladas I Took to His Ex

The Napkin

I am Jessica Voigt. I was thirty-six that spring. I run the scale house at the co-op elevator in Adrian, which means I weigh every truck that comes in full and goes out empty, and I write down the moisture and the test weight, and I am not wrong very often about numbers.

So in the morning, before my shift, I sat at the table with a cup of coffee and a paper napkin and I did the math on what $7,000 meant.

Crystal’s support order was $640 a month. I knew that number because Shane had said it out loud more than once, usually in a tone that made it sound like a lot. Seven thousand dollars was close to eleven months of it.

Eleven months. I wrote the number down and circled it. Eleven months that Kaden had gone without something. I did not know what yet. Shoes, maybe. The field trip to the zoo in Sioux Falls. The heat bill. I did not know, and that bothered me most of all.

Kaden came to us every other Sunday afternoon, from noon until seven. Never overnight. Crystal had never allowed it, not once in the four years Shane and I had been married, and I had always taken that personally. I had thought she did not trust me.

Sitting there with the napkin, I understood she had not trusted him. And she had been right not to.

Shane came into the kitchen around seven in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and he poured himself coffee without looking at me.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said to the coffee maker. “I shouldn’t have said grateful.”

“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.” I kept my eyes on the napkin, because I was afraid of what I would say if I looked up at him.

“I’ll get the furnace money back. I’ll pick up hours.”

“When did you stop paying her?” I asked. I already had a guess. I wanted to hear him say it out loud in our kitchen.

He was quiet a long time. “June. Maybe May.”

“And the county? They must have sent letters. They do not just reach into a tax refund without warning a person first.”

“They went to the post office box,” he said, and for the first time all morning he looked ashamed instead of just tired.

The post office box. He had kept it from before we were married, for his hunting license renewals and his union stuff, he said. I had never thought about it twice.

“You hid it,” I said. It was not a question, and he knew it was not, and he looked down into his coffee.

“I didn’t hide it. I just didn’t bring it home.”

I folded the napkin into a square and put it in the pocket of my vest. “I have to go to work,” I said, and I went.

The Scale House

The scale house in March is a quiet place. Most of the corn moved in the fall, and what is left goes out in spurts when the market ticks up. A few farmers bring in bins they held over, hoping for a better price. Mostly I sit at the window with the little space heater going and do paperwork and watch the dirty snow melt off the driveway.

Dale, who manages the elevator, stuck his head in around ten. Dale is sixty-two and has been at the co-op since before I was born, and he can tell when something is wrong with a person faster than he can tell when a grain probe is wet.

“You look like you got a dead battery,” he said, leaning on the doorframe in his brown work coat with his seed cap pushed back.

“Something like that.”

“Truck or husband?” he asked, because with the people Dale knows, it is usually one or the other.

I almost laughed. “Husband.”

He nodded and did not ask anything else. That is Dale. He came back an hour later with a maple long john from the Casey’s and set it on the corner of my desk and left again.

I ate half of it at the window, watching a farmer from Rushmore pull a load of corn onto the scale, and I thought about Kaden.

He was a good kid. A buzz cut every spring because he hated hair in his eyes during baseball. Freckles. He called me Jessica, never Mom, never anything else, and that was right. He had a mother. He played catch with Shane in the yard and looked over at the kitchen window every few throws to see if I was watching.

The last Sunday in February, he had asked if he could take two enchiladas home for his mom. I said of course and wrapped them in foil, and I remember thinking it was sweet.

Now I wondered if it had been something else. I wondered if he had been thinking about what was in the refrigerator at home.

That thought sat in my stomach all morning like a stone.

By noon I knew what I was going to do. I did not know exactly what I would say. I only knew where I was going and what I would bring.