The Title With Her Name First
She fell asleep on my shoulder in that parking lot more than once, with tater tot salt on her fingers.
I’d sit there an extra twenty minutes with the engine running for the air so I didn’t wake her.
The drive is about nine miles. She did it at exactly the speed limit, never one mile over, with both hands at nine and three.
She signaled to change lanes on the bypass when there was nobody within a half mile of us.
“You’re doing great,” I said.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said. “I’m concentrating.”
So I didn’t talk. I looked out the window at the dark fields and the lights of a few farmhouses and the tobacco barns standing black against what was left of the sky, and I let her drive.
She pulled into a stall at the Sonic on the second try.
She put it in park and turned it off and sat back in the seat with her eyes closed, breathing like she’d run a mile.
“I did it,” she said.
“You did.”
She pressed the red button and ordered a cherry limeade, a large tots, and, without asking me, a Route 44 sweet tea and a chili cheese coney.
That was my order. It had been my order for ten years. I didn’t know she knew it.
While we waited, she turned the envelope over and over in her lap. Then she said, without looking at me, “Mom was crying last night. In the kitchen. Late.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I heard her on the phone with Aunt Jennifer,” Kaylee said. “She said she didn’t know how to do this. She said she didn’t know what she’d do if you left.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
“I know that,” Kaylee said. “I don’t think she does.”
The carhop came out on skates, a girl not much older than Kaylee, and handed the bag through the window.
Kaylee paid with her own birthday money before I could get my wallet out. She’d never paid for anything with me before in her life.
“Happy birthday to me,” she said, and handed me my coney.
We ate in the car with the windows down. It was still close to eighty degrees, that thick June air that sits on you in Kentucky like a wet towel.
Somebody two stalls over was playing a Chris Stapleton song with the bass turned way up.
“Austin,” Kaylee said. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask.”
“Why’d you do it? Put my name first. You could’ve put yours. It’s your money.”
I thought about how to say it. I’m not good at saying things. I fix heat pumps. But I tried.