The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

I paid the light bill and the water and caught up the house payment, and the envelope was gone in four days.

Two weekends later, Ethan came home from his daddy’s with mud on his jeans up to his knees and the biggest grin I had seen on him since Christmas.

“Mama, Daddy got a four-wheeler,” he said, before he even got his shoes off. “It’s used, but it runs great. He let me drive it around the back field by myself.”

Ben was right behind him, hopping. “I rode on the front! Daddy held me!”

I asked how much a used four-wheeler cost these days. I asked it like I was making conversation. Ethan is twelve and thinks he knows everything about engines.

“Daddy paid thirty-five hundred,” he said, proud as anything. “Cash. The man wanted four thousand, but Daddy talked him down.”

Thirty-five hundred dollars. I did the math standing there in my own hallway. It was exactly the part of the refund I had not gotten.

I called Duane that night after the kids were asleep. I kept my voice low because the walls in my house are thin and Kaitlyn sleeps light.

“Ethan says you bought a four-wheeler,” I said.

There was a long quiet on the line. Then he said, “It’s for the boys, Shawna. It’s something I can do with them on my weekends. You know I don’t have a lot to offer them at my place.”

“You told me every dollar.”

“I gave you forty-five hundred. That’s more than…” He stopped himself. He knew how the end of that sentence sounded.

“You swore on your kids,” I said.

“It is for my kids,” he said, and he hung up.

I sat in the dark kitchen and thought about everything I could do. I am a practical woman.

I work at a bank. I know what the options are, and I went through every one of them.

I could not touch that refund. I had signed the form myself. On paper, that money was Duane’s, and there was not a judge in Kentucky who would say different just because he had made me a promise at a kitchen table.

The back support was still owed, and the county attorney’s office could go after it.

But the woman there had told me in the fall that a contempt hearing was running most of a year out. A year was not going to put shoes on anybody.

I could have told the kids. Kaitlyn would have understood every word, and that was exactly the reason I would not.

She already watched her daddy too closely. I was not going to hand her one more thing to carry.

I could have gone to his apartment and yelled. I have never been a yeller.

I have seen what it does to children, standing in a doorway, listening to grown people they love tear at each other.

So I did the thing I know how to do. I got out a pencil and a piece of notebook paper, and I made a list.

Ben had been telling me since February that his toes hurt. He is six and he does not complain about much, so when he complains about something, I listen.

I took his sneakers off him that week and pressed my thumb at the front. His big toe was right up against the end.

He had been curling his feet inside them so he would not have to tell me.