The Toys We Wrapped Twice

The night of the twenty-sixth

After the boys went to bed I sat at my kitchen table with the receipt in front of me and a cup of coffee I did not drink.

Jeremy and I have been divorced for three years. It was not a terrible divorce, as divorces go. Nobody cheated. Nobody threw anything. We just ran out of things to say to each other that were not about money.

He drives a truck for a feed and grain outfit out of Emporia. He leaves before four in the morning most days and comes home after dark. He is a good driver and he has never once been late to pick the boys up.

I knew his hours had been cut since the fall. He had mentioned it once, in October, when he was two weeks late on child support and called to tell me before I had to ask. I had not asked what it meant.

I picked up my phone and opened a message to him. I typed: I found the receipt from Emporia. Then I sat there and looked at it for a long time.

I thought about everything I could say after that. I had a lot of things. Some of them were true and some of them were just mean, and at eleven o’clock at night the two kinds looked exactly alike.

I deleted it.

My sister, when I told her a few days later, asked why I did not just call the police. She said he took my property and sold it, and that was theft, plain and simple.

Maybe it was. But it was $640 and it was their father, and I was not calling the police on their dad at Christmas. I was not going to have my boys find out that way.

And that was the thing that kept coming back to me, sitting there. The boys did not have their presents. Whatever I did to Jeremy, it would not put a Lego fire station on Ty’s floor.

So I stopped thinking about Jeremy and started thinking about the boys.