The Steer Money Was Always Hers

The Kitchen Table

About ten minutes later the two of them came down together. Brooklyn had the laptop under her arm.

Kenzie flipped on the light over the table and saw me sitting there and said, “Dad, why are you in the dark?”

“Thinking,” I said.

“Well, think somewhere else, we need the table,” she said, and the two of them sat down side by side with the laptop and the charger and Brooklyn’s school log-in written on the back of an envelope.

I made popcorn because I did not know what else to do with my hands. I set the bowl between them and they did not even look up.

Kenzie showed her how to set the screen so it did not hurt her eyes at night.

Brooklyn asked what the button with the window on it did. Kenzie said, “Honestly, I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

Then Kenzie took Brooklyn’s phone, found a picture, and set it as the background on the laptop.

It was a picture Brooklyn had taken months before of Kenzie’s old steer, Duke, sticking his whole tongue out at the camera.

“Why do you have this?” Kenzie said.

“I thought he was funny,” Brooklyn said. “I used to go out and look at him when you weren’t there. I didn’t want you to think I was being weird.”

“You’re the only other person who liked Duke,” Kenzie said, and her eyes filled up, and she wiped them on the sleeve of her sweatshirt and pretended it was the popcorn salt.

I looked up and Tonya was in the doorway. I don’t know how long she had been standing there.

She had her arms crossed tight over her chest, and tears were running down her face, and she was not wiping them.

She did not come in. She watched her daughter and my daughter lean their heads together over a two hundred eighty dollar laptop with a cow on the screen, and then she went back down the hall without a word.