The Title With Her Name First

I laughed so hard she had to stop cutting. I asked her to dinner before I paid. She said no.

I came back three weeks later with hair that did not need cutting, and she said yes.

The first time I met Kaylee, she looked at me from behind her mother’s leg and asked if I could fix a nightlight.

I could. It was a burned-out bulb. She acted like I’d raised the dead.

Her father’s name is Travis. He left when Kaylee was two.

He moved to Tennessee with a woman he met at a bar in Lexington, and as far as I know, he has not sent one dollar in fourteen years.

Crystal went to the county attorney’s office about child support twice when Kaylee was small.

Both times Travis changed jobs, then changed states, then quit working anywhere that paid on the books. After a while she stopped going.

“I’m not chasing a man who doesn’t want to be caught,” she told me once, sitting on the porch steps after midnight. “Every time I chase him I lose a month of my life and he loses nothing.”

I moved in the next spring. It was Crystal’s rented house, two bedrooms on a street that dead-ends at a soybean field, and I paid half the rent from the first month.

Then I paid more than half, because I was getting overtime and she was not.

Here is the list nobody wrote down, so I will write it down now.

Kaylee’s braces were fifty-four hundred dollars. The orthodontist in Danville gave us a payment plan, two years of it, and every month the payment came out of my checking account.

Crystal’s insurance did not cover orthodontics at all, and Kaylee was not on mine.

Kaylee’s glasses were three pairs. The first pair was in fourth grade, when the teacher sent a note home that she was squinting at the board.

The second pair got sat on at band camp. The third pair she still wears, tortoiseshell, picked out after forty minutes.

Band trips. She plays clarinet in the marching band.

I paid for Gatlinburg twice, Orlando once, and every fall the fees, the shoes, the gloves, the black socks they make them buy from one supplier at twice the price.

School pictures. A science fair board. Lunch money for most of seventh grade, because Crystal’s chair rent went up and she did not tell me for two months.

Strep throat three winters in a row, and the copays, and the antibiotics.

I am not listing it to be paid back. I never asked for any of it back, and I never would.

I am listing it because on that Saturday night in June I stood in the grass and every one of those things went through my head like a ledger.