One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

“And yours. Once the money goes in, it’s his. You manage it till he’s twenty-one, but you can’t take it back out for yourself. That’s the rule. Just so you know what you’re signing.”

“That’s what I want,” I said. “I want it to be his.”

Krista read me his number over the phone from the bank lobby, in a voice like she was trying not to cry.

I set up a transfer of twenty-five dollars on the first of every month, and put in the first twenty-five in cash.

Jan printed out a little savings register with the bank’s name on the cover, the kind they still give out for kids’ accounts so the children can see the deposits written down.

On the first page it said Colton James Stoltz, and under that, Lynn M. Haverkamp, Custodian. The first line said twenty-five dollars and no cents.

I sat in my car in the bank parking lot and looked at that first page for a while. It wasn’t triumph.

It was more like finally mailing a letter you’ve put off for years. Then I drove back and finished the lunch count.

I did not tell Greg. It wasn’t mine to tell, and waving it in his face would have turned something good into something small.

The Sunday Colton came was the third Sunday in April, the first truly warm day we’d had.

The sky was that pale clean blue you get in Iowa after a week of rain, and the sun came in sideways through the dining room windows and lay across the table in long bright strips.

I had the chicken in the oven by eleven that morning, the way Mom taught me, with onions and carrots underneath.

I peeled ten pounds of potatoes because I didn’t know how much a seven-year-old eats. Mom brought her rolls.

I wore my sage green sweater, the soft one Maddie gave me for Christmas, and my grandmother’s ring. I changed out of the sweater twice and back into it.

Krista’s car pulled in at a quarter to twelve. She didn’t come to the door.

She got out and walked Colton to the bottom of the porch steps and crouched down and fixed his collar, and then she looked up at me in the doorway and nodded once, and I nodded back. That was all either of us needed to say.

Colton came up the steps one at a time. He had on a striped shirt, blue and white, that looked brand new, with the fold lines still in it, and his blond buzz cut was wet and combed like somebody had worked on it in the bathroom.

He was holding a plastic grocery bag with something rectangular in it.

“Hi, Miss Lynn,” he said. That’s what he called me at school. All the kids do. “I brought something.” He held out the bag.

Inside was a drawing on construction paper of a football field, with stick figures on it, and one big stick figure throwing a ball to a small one.

At the top was Noah’s name in careful crayon letters, every letter a different color.

I had to look at the ceiling for a second. Then I said, “Well, come on in. He’s right in here.”

My kids were in the living room, standing the way you stand when somebody important comes in. Noah had on his flannel shirt.

Maddie had her hair in the long braid she does every Sunday. Sam had his hands in his pockets.