Two Lawn Chairs at the Flagpole

Troy drives a flatbed for a lumber yard out of Chillicothe. He is a good father when he is home and he is gone a lot.

He pays his support on time, every month, and he has never once said a hard word about me to our boy.

A year ago last June he married Kendra. She is thirty five, from up near Columbus, and she works the front desk at a dentist’s office.

She is pretty and organized and she keeps a calendar on her refrigerator in three colors of marker.

I want to be fair to her, because I have had a long time to think about it. Kendra tries with Mason.

She buys him things. She takes him for haircuts. She posts pictures of the two of them on her page almost every weekend he is there.

And Mason is polite to her. He says please and thank you and yes ma’am.

My mother raised me that way and I raised him that way, and he is polite to everybody, from the bus driver to the man at the gas station.

But he has never run to her. He has never climbed in her lap or fallen asleep against her arm in the car. I think, looking back, that was the part she could not stand.

Mason calls my mother Grandma, and he calls Troy’s mother Mamaw, and he calls Kendra Kendra. He was not trying to hurt anyone.

He was seven when she came into his life, and that is just the name she had.

That Saturday evening, sitting on my own porch steps in the last of the daylight, I went through every call I could make, one at a time.

I could call Kendra. I knew exactly how that would go. She would say she had signed up fair and square, and I would say something I would be sorry for, and Mason would hear about it from both of us by Sunday.

I could call Troy. But Troy was hauling a load to a job site in Indiana and would not be home until the next Saturday.

I was not going to make him referee his wife and his ex-wife from a truck stop in Richmond.

I could call the school and fight for the seat. I was Mason’s mother, after all. I could have told them it was a mistake, or demanded they make an exception.

But I kept seeing it. Mason in that lunchroom with his tray, and his mother and his stepmother standing over him, both of us smiling too hard, both of us wanting the same chair.

I would not do that to him. He was eight years old. He had already watched two grown-ups he loved come apart once.

He did not need a second show in front of his whole class.

So on Monday morning, on my break between clients, I called the school office and asked one question, and only one.

“Can family visit at recess?”