Two Brown Coats on the Sled Hill

Cole came out of his dad’s house that Sunday in a thin gray hoodie with the sleeves pulled down over his hands, and the thermometer on my dashboard said 28 degrees.

He walked down the driveway fast, the way kids walk when they are cold and trying not to show it. His backpack was over one shoulder. His cheeks were already red.

I got out of the car before he reached it. “Cole, honey. Where’s your coat?”

He stopped on the edge of the driveway and looked at his shoes. They were the same shoes I had bought him in August, and the laces were wet from the thin snow.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “I’m not that cold.”

That is the thing about a ten-year-old boy. He will tell you he is not cold while his teeth are going like a sewing machine.

I opened the passenger door and pushed the heat all the way up. He climbed in and held his hands over the vent, and I stood there in the driveway a second longer than I needed to.

The front door of the house was shut. The blinds were down. Nobody came out to wave, which was normal, and nobody came out to explain, which was not.

I got in, buckled up, and backed out onto the street. We were two blocks down before I asked again, and I asked it softer.

“Bud. Where’s the brown coat?”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said it to the window instead of to me.

“Shawna gave it to Kaden.”

The coat

I need to tell you about that coat, because it was not just a coat to me, and I think a lot of mothers will understand why.

I am a dental hygienist. I work four days a week at a family practice on Main Street, cleaning teeth and taking X-rays and telling grown men they need to floss. I make a decent living for our town.

Decent is not the same as easy. I pay the mortgage on a two-bedroom house by myself. I pay for Cole’s hockey, his glasses, and the orthodontist we both know is coming in about two years.

Brent and I have been divorced a little over four years. We married young, we tried hard, and then one day we were two people who were very polite to each other in a kitchen.

Nobody cheated. Nobody threw anything. We just ran out, the way a well runs out, and by the time we noticed, it had been dry for a while.

Brent pays his child support on time, every month, straight out of his check. I want to say that early, because he is not a bad man, and this is not a story about a bad man.

He works nights at the turkey plant over in Faribault. His shift is ten at night to six-thirty in the morning, Sunday through Thursday, and in November they add Friday nights because of Thanksgiving.

Anybody from southern Minnesota knows what November is at a turkey plant. Those men come home looking like they have been through a war, and they sleep like they have died.

Two years ago he married Shawna. She has two children from before: Kaden, who is eleven, and a little girl who is four. Kaden is a year ahead of Cole at the elementary school.