The Check at the Graduation Party

Kristen called on a Tuesday in March, while I was still in my scrubs at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee and a stack of field trip permission slips I had promised to sort before bed.

“I’m just going to say it, Michelle,” she said, in the voice people use when they have practiced in the car. “Greg contributed to Abby’s college account. Tyler is family now. It should be split.”

I put the permission slips down. Outside, the wind was pushing sleet sideways across the yard, the way it does in northwest Ohio when March can’t decide what it wants to be.

“Split,” I said.

“Fairly,” she said. “Between the kids. Greg is Tyler’s father now in every way that counts, and Greg put money into that account. I’m not asking for anything crazy. I’m asking for fair.”

I should explain the account, because everything that happened that spring sits on top of it, the way a house sits on a foundation nobody thinks about until it cracks.

The day Abby was born, I was twenty-four and had just finished my nursing boards. I had a little savings account at the credit union that I’d opened in high school, with almost nothing in it.

That afternoon my mother walked across the street from the hospital to the credit union branch with twenty-five dollars out of my purse and deposited it. From that day on, I told everybody, it was Abby’s college account.

My mother brought me back the deposit slip. I kept it. I don’t know why. I was tired and sore and probably a little foolish, but I folded that pink carbon copy in half and slid it into the back of my wallet, and it stayed there for years.

The account was in my name. It always was. I didn’t know enough then to ask about anything fancier, and later I didn’t see a reason to change it.

I just wanted a place where the money could sit and not get touched.

Greg and I split up when Abby was two. It wasn’t dramatic.

We were two young people who had gotten married because a baby was coming, and we figured out fast that a baby is not the same thing as a marriage.

He paid his child support. I want that on the record before anything else. Mostly on time, every month, for sixteen years.

That money went to shoes and braces and groceries and the orthodontist in Findlay who never once ran on schedule.

The college account was separate. That was my money, out of my paycheck, after the bills.

Twenty-five dollars a week when Abby was little. Fifty when I got on with the school district. Whatever was left in December when the Christmas list came in smaller than I’d feared.