One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

His front tooth had come out in his apple at lunch, and there was a little blood on his lip, and he looked like he wasn’t sure whether to be proud or scared.

I got him a paper towel and a little plastic tooth envelope, the kind we keep in the drawer for exactly this, shaped like a tooth with a snap on top.

I wrote his name on it with a marker. He watched me write every letter.

“My dad says I have a brother who played football,” he said, while he was holding the paper towel to his lip.

He said it like he was telling me about the weather. “He says he’s really big. He’s in college. I never met him.”

I put the cap back on the marker. I remember the click of it. “Is that right,” I said.

“Yeah,” Colton said. “And a sister. And another brother. Dad says they’re all busy.”

He took the tooth envelope and held it up to the light from the window to look at his tooth inside. “Do you think the tooth fairy knows when you lose it at school?”

“I think she checks the office,” I said. “We send her a list.”

He grinned at me with the gap in his teeth, and he went back down the hall to Mrs. Hughes’s room, and I sat at my desk and looked at the attendance sheet without reading a single name on it for a good ten minutes.

That night I didn’t sleep much. I thought about Greg’s neat printing and the word fair.

Then I thought about that gap-toothed grin, and a little boy who knew he had a big brother and had never been told his name.

I’m not going to pretend I was a saint about it. I was angrier at Greg than I had been in five years.

I thought about calling him and telling him exactly what I thought.

But I kept coming back to what Mom said. Greg’s arithmetic was wrong in every way that mattered, but one thing underneath it wasn’t wrong at all.

Colton didn’t have Walt and Bev. He didn’t have a farm to come to.

He didn’t have brothers and a sister who knew his name.

On Saturday I called Krista. I had her number from the school emergency card, and I felt strange using it, but I had decided I would ask her straight and let her say no if she wanted to.

She picked up on the fourth ring and sounded like she had just woken up, which she had, because she worked the overnight shift.

“This is Lynn Haverkamp,” I said. “From the school office. Noah’s mom.”

There was a long pause. I could hear a television in the background, cartoons. “Okay,” she said carefully.

“I wanted to ask you something, and you can tell me no,” I said.

“I’d like to have Colton over for Sunday dinner. With Noah and Maddie and Sam. Just dinner, at my house, after church. Roast chicken. My folks will be there. I’ll pick him up and bring him home, or you can drop him off, whichever you’d rather.”

Krista was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, “Does Greg know you’re asking?”

“No,” I said. “I thought I’d ask you first. He’s your son.”

She laughed, a short tired laugh that wasn’t happy or unhappy. “He asks about them,” she said.

“All the time. He has a picture of Noah from the paper, from a football game, on his wall. Greg cut it out for him.”