The Enchiladas I Took to His Ex

The Door

It was late afternoon, and the light was going flat and pale the way it does in March before the sun is serious about anything. I walked up the shoveled path with the pan held out in front of me like an offering, which I suppose it was.

I knocked.

It took a while. I heard a television, then footsteps, then the lock.

Crystal opened the door in light blue scrubs, her brown hair twisted up in a bun. She had the look of somebody who had been on her feet for twelve hours and had just sat down for the first time.

She was a nursing assistant at the care center on the east side of town. I knew that much. I knew she worked doubles. I had never thought about why.

She looked at me. Then at the pan. Then back at me.

“Jessica?”

In four years we had spoken maybe ten words to each other, all of them at handoffs, all of them about jackets and what time and did he eat.

“I made too many enchiladas,” I said.

It was not true, and we both knew it was not true, and somehow saying something that silly made my shoulders come down an inch.

Behind her, a buzz cut peeked out from around her hip. Then one eye and half a freckled face.

“Hi, buddy,” I said.

Kaden did not say anything. He just watched me with that careful look kids get when the adults are doing something they have not seen before.

Crystal did not take the pan. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

“If this is about the money,” she said, very quietly so the boy would not hear, though of course he heard, “I didn’t take anything he didn’t owe. I waited a long time before I went to the county.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not here about the money.”

She waited.

“I’m here to ask you something.” I took a breath. “From now on, when it’s about Kaden, call me. Not Shane. School stuff. Doctor stuff. If his shoes are too small, if there’s a field trip, if something comes up. Call me first.”

Crystal’s mouth opened, and then it closed again.

Her eyes went wet, fast, the way it happens when you have been holding something for so long that one kind word knocks it right out of you. She looked away from me, out at the snowbank by the driveway.

“Do you know,” she said, “what this winter was like?”

Before I could answer, Kaden stepped out from behind her.

He looked at the foil pan. Then he looked up at me, and his voice was small.

“Jessica? Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, bud.”

He swallowed. “Is Dad in trouble because of me?”

What He Asked

I have thought about that moment a hundred times since.

I did not think. I just set the pan down on the step and went down on one knee in the slush, so my face was level with his, and I put both my hands on his shoulders.

“No,” I said. “No, sir. Nobody is in trouble because of you. Not one bit of this is about anything you did.”

“Mom was crying about money,” he said. “At Christmas. And Dad doesn’t call when he says.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s grown-up stuff, and the grown-ups are going to fix it. That’s our job. Your job is baseball and fourth grade.”

“Fifth,” he said, offended, and I said, “Fifth. Sorry,” and the corner of his mouth went up the way his father’s does.

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded, once, like a little old man agreeing to terms, and he picked up the pan off the step with both hands.

“Can we eat these now?” he said to his mother. “They’re the green ones.”

Crystal laughed. It came out of her half like a sob. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and stepped aside.

“You’d better come in,” she said to me. “It’s cold.”