The Enchiladas I Took to His Ex

“Well,” Shane said, folding the letter in half along a crease that was not there yet. “You should be grateful she finally got paid.”

It was a little after midnight, the night the letter came, a Tuesday in March. He had just come in from second shift at the pork plant in Worthington, and he still had his hair net balled up in his coat pocket.

I had been sitting at the kitchen table since nine o’clock with the letter flat in front of me, my supper plate pushed to one side, the furnace kicking on and off the way it does when the wind comes across the fields from South Dakota.

The letter said our joint tax refund, the whole $6,800 of it, federal and state together, had been applied to past-due child support. The amount owed was $7,000. The person owed was Crystal Barnes.

Crystal was Shane’s ex-wife. She was the mother of his son, Kaden, who was ten years old and who ate more of my enchiladas on a Sunday afternoon than his father did all week.

For a year, Shane had told me he was paying. Every month, he said, straight to Crystal, the way they had set it up when they divorced, with no paycheck withholding. I never once asked to see a receipt.

“Grateful,” I said. I said it slowly, the way I repeat a number back to a farmer at the scale when I am sure he has read his own ticket wrong.

He shrugged out of his coat. “It’s paid now. That’s what you wanted, right? Everybody’s square.”

“Everybody is not square, Shane. That was our furnace money. That was the dentist. That was the brakes.”

“I’ll make it up,” he said. He would not look at me. He went to the sink and ran a glass of water he did not drink.

“You told me you were paying her,” I said. “Every month. You looked right at me across this table and said it.”

He set the letter on the counter, face down, like that changed what was on it. “I was paying her. Mostly. Then I wasn’t. It’s handled.”

That was all I got that night. He went to take a shower, and I sat there and listened to the water run, and I thought about who I could call.

There was nobody. That is the part people do not understand when they hear this. The state had already done the collecting. Crystal had already gone to the county. There was nothing left to report and nobody left to make pay. The thing that needed fixing was in my own house.

I went to bed. I did not cry and I did not slam a door. I lay on my side of the bed and looked at the dark window, and after a while I heard the television come on low in the living room. He did not come to bed. I think he slept in the recliner.