One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

She stopped. “He’d want to come. I work Saturday night, but I could drop him at a quarter to twelve before I go to bed, if Greg can pick him up after.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s just fine.”

Telling my own kids was harder than telling Krista. I did it Sunday night over spaghetti, because that’s what I make when I have something hard to say and want everybody to stay at the table.

Noah set his fork down and looked at me without a word. Noah is like my dad that way. He turns a thing over before he speaks.

Sam, who was fourteen and still curious before he was anything else, said, “Wait, Dad’s kid? The little one? He’s coming here?”

Maddie was the one I worried about. She was seventeen, and she had taken the divorce hardest, because at eleven she had been old enough to understand and young enough to blame herself.

“He’s the reason Dad left,” she said. Her voice was flat and calm, which was worse than if she had yelled.

“You know that, right? We wouldn’t have had any of that if he wasn’t born.”

“I know that’s how it feels,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you it isn’t. But he was a baby, Mads. He didn’t pick anything. Your dad picked. I picked some things, too. That little boy was the only one in the whole mess who didn’t pick a single thing.”

She looked at her plate for a long time. Then she said, “Does Dad know about this?”

“Not yet,” I said. Then, because they were old enough, I told them about the business card.

I didn’t want them hearing some other version at his kitchen table and wondering what else I had kept from them.

Noah finally spoke. “He wanted a quarter of Grandpa’s money,” he said slowly, “for Colton.”

“Yes.”

“And Grandpa said no.”

“Grandpa said it stays for you three. Which is fine.” I took a breath.

“But that boy still doesn’t have anybody saving for him. So I’m going to start something small for him myself. Twenty-five dollars a month out of my paycheck. It’s what I can do.”

Sam did the math out loud. “That’s three hundred a year.”

“Three thousand three hundred,” Noah said. “Eleven years. Plus whatever interest.”

“It’s not about the amount,” I said. “It’s about somebody writing his name down on something and meaning it.”

Maddie pushed her chair back and took her plate to the sink and rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher, which is the kind of thing she does when she’s not ready to agree but isn’t going to argue anymore.

At the doorway to the hall she stopped. “I’m not going to pretend I’m happy about it,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to,” I said. “I’m asking you to pass the rolls.”

On Monday I went to the bank on my lunch hour, the same little brick bank on Cedar Street where Dad opened the college accounts.

The woman at the new accounts desk was Jan, who went to high school with my sister.

I told her I wanted to open a savings account for a little boy who wasn’t mine. She didn’t bat an eye.

She said that happens more than people think, grandparents and godparents and aunts, and that the simplest thing was a custodial savings account under the Iowa Uniform Transfers to Minors Act, with me as custodian and Colton as the owner.

“I’ll need his Social Security number and his birth date,” Jan said.