The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

Grand Rapids

I called the number on a Monday and got an appointment for a Thursday in early May. My dad took the day off from the part-time work he does for a neighbor’s landscaping crew, and picked me up at seven in his pickup so we’d be early.

I had everything in a manila folder on my lap. Both boys’ birth certificates. Alden’s death certificate, one of the twelve certified copies the funeral home gave me.

My driver’s license. Six months of bank statements, so they could see I paid my bills. A letter from the school office saying both boys were enrolled and lived at my address.

My dad didn’t say much on I-196. He kept the radio low on the farm report and drove exactly the speed limit the whole way, the way he always has, hands at ten and two.

Outside the windows the orchards were coming into bloom and somebody was already planting corn.

Somewhere around Jenison he said, “You know she’s going to be hurt.”

“I know.”

“I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying know it going in.”

“I know, Dad.”

He nodded and didn’t say anything else until we were in the parking lot. Then he reached over and squeezed my hand once, hard, the way he did when I was little and about to get a shot at the doctor.

The office was the kind of office you’d expect, rows of plastic chairs and a ticket machine and a television on the wall nobody was watching.

We waited about twenty minutes. A woman about my mother’s age called my number and I sat down across the window from her with my folder.

She was kind. She was also very careful. She asked for my ID and both birth certificates and looked at each one under the light.

She asked for the death certificate and typed in Alden’s number. She looked at her screen a long time.

“I see there’s a payee already on both children,” she said. “A Darlis Kuiper. Is that the grandmother?”

“Yes. His mother.”

“And who do the children live with, ma’am?”

“Me,” I said. “Every night of their lives.”

She nodded and kept typing. She asked whether the boys had ever lived with their grandmother. I said no.

She asked whether I received any of the money. I told her about the six hundred dollars in the envelope every first Sunday.

She stopped typing. She didn’t say anything about it. She just wrote something on a pad beside her keyboard and went back to the form, which she told me was called an SSA-11, a request to be selected as payee.

She read me each question and filled in my answers.