The Names Sewn Inside the Collars

Brynn came up the porch steps that Sunday night with her backpack over one shoulder and her duffel bag hanging open, and I could see from the door that it was half empty.

Travis stayed down by the truck with the engine running. He always did.

He lifted one hand off the steering wheel, the way you wave at a neighbor you don’t plan to talk to, and waited for me to wave back.

I didn’t. I was looking at the bag. I had packed it myself on Friday, and I knew what had gone into it, because I had folded every piece at the kitchen table with the radio on.

“Where are your new jeans, baby?” I asked Brynn. I kept my voice light, the way you do when you already know the answer is going to hurt somebody, and you would rather it not be the child.

She shrugged and looked at her shoes. “Daddy said they got too small. He said he’d put them in a bag for the church.”

They were three weeks old. I had bought them in Bloomington on the second Saturday of August, and I had made her try on three sizes in the fitting room until she rolled her eyes at me.

Callie came up behind her sister dragging her pillow by one corner, the way she had since she was two.

She was seven and still did that. She leaned against my leg and yawned so wide her eyes watered.

I walked down to the truck. Travis rolled the window halfway, which was about as far as he ever rolled it for me anymore. The radio was on low, a ballgame, the Cardinals losing again.

“Brynn’s jeans,” I said. “The dark ones. They aren’t in her bag.”

“They outgrew them, Jess,” he said, and he said it so easily, like it was the weather. “Kids grow. You can’t put a nine-year-old in the same pants all year.”

“I bought them in August.”

“Well, she’s bigger than she was in August.” He put the truck in reverse.

“I gotta be up at four. Tell the girls I love them.” And he backed out of my gravel drive and was gone.

I stood there in the dark with the moths banging into the porch light, and I told myself it was one pair of jeans. I told myself that for about two more weekends.