The Ranger I Drove to Her Recital

What He Told Everyone

By the next morning the story was already ahead of me. That is how it works in a county where everybody went to school with everybody.

My cousin Denise called before I had my coffee made. She wanted to know if it was true that I had let Travis take the car because I could not keep up the insurance.

That was the version going around. In that version I was the one who had given up.

I told her the truth. The car had been titled in his name because my credit was shot from his spending when we were married. He had sold it out from under me while I was at work, and he knew exactly what Thursday was.

Denise got quiet. Then she said Travis had told his mother I had been missing Madison’s things on purpose.

He was saying I was too wrapped up in myself to drive the child where she needed to go, and that he was worried sick about it.

That was the part that took the wind out of me. Not the car. The car was a thing with wheels.

It was the sentence he had built around it. The idea he was planting in every kitchen in town, that I was a mother who did not show up.

I had been at every single thing. I was the one who sewed loops of elastic on her first tap shoes because the strap buttons were cheap and kept popping.

I was the one who sat in the cold studio parking lot three evenings a week reading a paperback while she had class.

Travis came to one recital in two years. He came late, and he left at the break to take a phone call, and he did not come back in.

But he was the one worried sick now. That is how it goes. The one who does nothing gets to narrate.

I did not call his mother back to defend myself. Defending yourself to people who have already decided is just handing them more to repeat.

I hung up with Denise and I looked at the calendar with the red mark on Thursday. I decided the only thing that would ever shut the story up was Madison, walking in, on my arm.

Second Shift and a Coffee Can

I work the line at the parts plant out past the river. I run a press that stamps brackets for somebody’s dashboard three states away.

Second shift, two in the afternoon to ten thirty at night, and all the overtime I can stand. Overtime is how people like me buy anything at all.

There is no lump of money sitting anywhere. There is just the next shift, and the one after that, and what you can keep yourself from spending in between.

I had a coffee can on top of the refrigerator with eleven dollars in it. That was the whole of my transportation fund the night the car disappeared.

I am not ashamed to say it. Most of the women I work beside have a can just like it.

So I did the only math I had. I picked up every double they would give me.

I told my supervisor I needed hours and I needed them quick. He is a decent man named Hollis who has three grown daughters of his own, and he put me on the Saturday crew without my even finishing the sentence.