The Birthday Box on His Porch

The text came at 2:14 in the morning, while I was holding pressure on a farmhand’s forearm in bay six and telling him not to look at it. My phone buzzed twice in my scrub pocket, and I let it buzz.

It was a clean cut from a piece of sheet metal, deep but not dangerous, and he was more worried about missing work Monday than about the nineteen stitches.

I told him Monday was a long way off. He laughed, which is what I wanted.

When he was settled and the doctor was signing off, I stepped into the hallway by the supply room and finally took the phone out.

Two messages from Cody. My ex-husband does not text me at two in the morning unless something is wrong with our son.

So my heart was already going before I read a word. That is what sixteen years of being somebody’s mother does to you. Every late message is a wreck on the highway until it proves it isn’t.

The first one said, “That box you sent. I hooked it up to make sure it worked.”

The second one came right under it. “Been playing it some nights. It quit on me Thursday. Just tell him you forgot to send anything. Easier that way.”

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because I thought I must be tired enough to be misunderstanding plain English. I wasn’t. He meant exactly what he wrote.

Tanner was turning sixteen that very day. It was spring break, which this year meant it was his daddy’s week, and his daddy lived four hours from me, out past Levelland on the flat plains west of Lubbock.

I had not been going to see my son on his sixteenth birthday. I had made my peace with that the way you make peace with weather. You do not get every birthday when you divorce. Nobody does.

So I had done the next best thing. Back at the beginning of the month, I ordered him the game console he had been talking about since Christmas, the new one, five hundred dollars, and paid extra to have it gift wrapped.

I had it shipped straight to Cody’s house so it would be there waiting. The tracking said it was delivered Monday afternoon. I had pictured Tanner opening it Saturday morning with the wrapping paper still on it.

Instead his father had opened it Monday, hooked it up, played it in the middle of the night for the better part of a week, and broken it. And now he wanted me to tell our boy I forgot him.

Forgot. Like I could ever forget the day I had him. Twenty-two hours of labor at the old hospital in Abilene, and a nurse named Kim holding my hand the whole last stretch, which is half the reason I became one.

I stood in that hallway with the phone in my hand and felt the anger come up in me like heat off a parking lot in August. I had a whole reply typed before I knew I was typing it.

I am not going to tell you what it said. It was not something I would want my mother to read.

I looked at it for a long time, and then I deleted it one letter at a time.

People have asked me since why I didn’t just call him right then and let him have it. It is a fair question. I asked it of myself all night.