The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

He was behind because the fabrication shop in Calvert City had laid off half the floor the summer before.

He had gone four months without steady work, then picked up a job at a shop in Paducah that paid less.

I had not taken him back to court over it. I had called the county attorney’s child support office once, in the fall, and a nice woman told me how long things were running. I hung up and did the math myself.

Support was $720 a month. Eleven months of it was $7,920. Duane said the refund would come in right around $8,000.

It was the first time in a year that the numbers lined up on my side.

“Swear it,” I said. I do not know why. We were too old for swearing on things.

“On my kids,” he said. “Every dollar.”

I signed the form. I signed it right there at my kitchen table, with the cup of pencils between us that Rosie had painted for me in second grade, and I slid it back.

He folded it into his jacket pocket and kissed the top of my head on his way out, the way he used to when we were nineteen and broke and happy about it. I sat there a long time after the door shut.

You should know a few things about Duane, because I am not going to pretend he is a bad man.

He is not. He is a man who grew up with nothing and has been trying to catch up ever since.

His daddy left when he was seven. Evelyn raised him by herself on what she made as a cook at the elementary school, plus whatever she could sew for people on the side.

There was no bicycle. There was no new anything. Duane wore his cousins’ coats and his cousins’ boots, and he told me once that the first pair of shoes he ever picked out himself, he bought with his own money at sixteen.

He loves his kids. He coaches Ethan’s ball team when his shifts allow it.

He can still lift Ben over his head with one arm. He has never once raised his voice to any of them.

But money goes through Duane like water through a cracked bucket. When we were married, I was the one who held the bucket. After the divorce, nobody did.

Evelyn knew that about him better than I did. She had known it for forty-four years.

And Evelyn had been good to me since I was twenty-three. When Kaitlyn was born she stayed with us for two weeks and did every load of laundry.

When the divorce papers were signed, she called me that same night and said, “You’re still mine, you know.”

I had held onto that sentence for two years. It is one of the reasons I almost did not do what I did.

The refund came the first week of March. I knew because Duane texted me a picture of his bank app with the deposit on it, and a thumbs up. It was $8,014.

He came by that Saturday with an envelope. It had $4,500 in it, in hundreds and fifties, from his own bank in Paducah.

I know what a bank envelope feels like. I count them for a living.

“The rest is coming,” he said, on my porch. “I’ve got some things to square up first. Couple weeks, tops.”

I put the envelope in my purse and said thank you, because it was still more than he had given me in a year.