The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

I worked Christmas Day, which I had volunteered for so the nurses with little kids could be home.

I got home a little after seven-thirty, kicked off my work shoes, and stood in the kitchen eating cold ham out of the foil. And at twenty till nine, my phone rang.

It was Corey. He didn’t say hello.

“Heidi,” he said, and his voice was thick, like he had been crying, or was about to. “Do you know what our girl told me today?”

“No,” I said. I sat down at the kitchen table. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

He was quiet for a long time. I could hear his truck’s engine idling, and I understood he had gone out to sit in it so Addison wouldn’t hear him.

“She gave me a present after dinner,” he said. “A pair of leather work gloves. The good ones from the farm store. She said she saved her allowance since Thanksgiving to buy them.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“And she sat down next to me on the couch,” he said, “and she said, ‘Daddy, I know Mama’s been cleaning the stalls. Miss Mae told everybody. I’m not mad at you for being broke.'” His voice cracked on the word broke.

“And then she said, ‘I’m only sad you said it was Mama. You don’t have to be the fun one, Daddy. You just have to tell me the truth.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“Then she said the gloves were so I could come shovel with you guys,” Corey said. “She said it’s kind of fun. She said Mama sings.”

“I don’t sing,” I said, and it came out half a laugh and half something else.

“She said you sing,” he said. And then my ex-husband, the proudest man I ever married, sat in his truck on Christmas night and cried on the phone to me like a boy.

When he could talk again, he told me all of it. The plant had cut the Saturday shifts at the end of August.

He’d lost almost six hundred dollars a month in overtime. The truck note was eating him alive. He had been two payments behind since October.

“I signed her up because I wanted to be the one she ran to,” he said.

“You’ve got her the whole week. You’ve got school and homework and the dentist. I wanted to be the fun one. Then the money went, and I couldn’t stand to tell her her daddy was broke.”

“So you told her it was me,” I said. I said it quietly. I wasn’t throwing it at him.

I just wanted it set down on the table between us where we could both see it.

“So I told her it was you,” he said. “It was easier. It was the worst thing I ever did, and it was easier.”

He breathed out hard. “I’m sorry, Heidi. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to fix it.”

I have been angry at Corey Larkin for a lot of years, about a lot of things.

Sitting at that kitchen table with cold ham on my fingers, I found out I didn’t have much of it left. Mostly I was tired. And mostly I was proud of our girl.

“You tell her the truth yourself,” I said. “Tomorrow, in your own words, not because Mae said it. And you tell Mae. She’s owed that much.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I will.”

“And Corey,” I said. “Six o’clock comes early out there. Bring your own fork. Mae’s are mostly taken.”