The Enchiladas I Took to His Ex

The Kitchen Table

Her duplex was small and clean and smelled like dryer sheets. There was a calendar on the refrigerator with her shifts written in red pen and Kaden’s practices in blue. Almost every square had red in it.

Kaden got out three plates without being asked. Crystal put the pan in the oven at three-fifty to warm it through, and we sat at her kitchen table, which was smaller than mine, with a vinyl tablecloth with lemons on it.

For a while we did not say anything. Kaden went to put his pajamas on, and the oven ticked, and Crystal turned her coffee cup around and around.

“He told you he was paying,” she finally said. It was not a question.

“Every month,” I said. “Straight to you. That is what he told me, and I never once asked to see it.”

She shook her head slowly. “He paid through last May. A little in June. Then nothing. I texted him. I called. He’d say next Friday, next Friday. Then he quit answering.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

She gave me a look that was not unkind. “Would you have believed me?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I would have.”

“That’s why,” she said, and she got up and checked the oven, though it had only been five minutes.

She told me the rest while the enchiladas warmed. She told me in a flat, tired voice, like a person reading off a list she had read to herself many times.

Her landlord had given her a thirty-day notice in January for being two months behind. She had borrowed eight hundred dollars from her mother in Fulda, who did not have eight hundred dollars to spare. She had picked up every double the care center would give her, which meant Kaden was at her neighbor’s three nights a week, eating boxed macaroni and doing homework at somebody else’s table.

She had gone to the county child support office in September, after the fourth month of nothing. They opened a case. They sent Shane letters. When the letters got no answer, they certified the arrears for the tax refund offset, and that was that.

“I didn’t want to,” she said. “I want you to know that. I didn’t want the county in it. Once they’re in it, they’re in it. But I was going to lose this place.”

“You almost lost your house,” I said.

“I almost lost his house,” she said, and nodded toward the hallway where Kaden was. “This is the only one he’s ever had.”

I sat with that.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have asked more questions.”

“It wasn’t your job to ask,” she said, and I said, “It was my refund too,” and for a second neither of us knew whether that was allowed to be funny.

She looked at me for a second, and then she almost smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess it was. I’m sorry about that part.”

“Don’t be,” I said, and meant it. “It went where it should have gone a year ago.”