The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

I waited until Evelyn had said grace and the fried chicken had gone around the table once. Then I took the folded paper out of my purse and handed it across to her.

She looked at it, then at me over the top of her glasses. Evelyn Fiedler is seventy years old, and in all the time I have known her she has never once taken a piece of paper without reading it.

Her checkbook was lying beside her plate. She had paid the light bill out of it that morning after church and never put it back in the drawer, the way she never does.

Three kids sat around that little dining room table on a Sunday afternoon in March, and the oldest was in the kitchen pouring tea.

Ethan, Rosie and Ben, twelve down to six, were all reaching for the same bowl of mashed potatoes.

None of them knew what was written on that paper. Their daddy did. Duane sat at the end of the table in his black T-shirt, and he was looking at his plate like it had something to tell him.

To understand why I did it, you have to go back to January, and to my kitchen table in Mayfield, and to a form I signed because the father of my children asked me to.

Duane came over on a Tuesday night after the kids were in bed. He knocked instead of walking in, which is how I knew he wanted something.

We had been divorced for two years by then, and he still mostly walked in.

He sat down at my table and pushed a paper across it. It was a Form 8332, the one the government uses when the parent the kids live with lets the other parent claim them for the child tax credit.

“Hear me out before you say no,” he said. He had his welding jacket on and smelled like the shop.

“I’ve done the math with the tax lady out on the bypass. It’s the best thing for everybody.”

I knew some of it already. I work the teller line at a bank branch in Mayfield.

I have counted out enough tax refunds over the counter to know how it goes for divorced folks every spring.

The child tax credit was $2,200 a child that year. Four kids made it $8,800 on paper.

But a credit only does you full good if you earn enough and pay enough tax to use it.

On my teller pay, raising four kids, I could not use all of it.

A good chunk would just fall away. On Duane’s welding pay, with his withholding, he could use nearly every dollar.

“The tax lady says the family comes out about two thousand ahead if I claim all four,” he said.

“You keep head of household. You keep your earned income credit. That stays with you no matter what.”

That part was true. I checked it later. The form only hands over the child tax credit. Everything else stays with the parent the kids sleep with every night, which was me.

Then he got to the part he had really come to say. He folded his hands on my table like he was in church, which he has not been in a while.

“I’m eleven months behind on support, Shawna. I know it. You know it. Every dollar I owe you comes out of that refund. All of it. You’ll have it the day it hits my account.”