“That walk is for real dads, Kay.”
Travis said it with his fork resting on the edge of his plate. The way he sets it down when he’s about to say something he practiced in the truck on the way home.
It was a Tuesday supper in the middle of October. Two days before senior night.
I’d made tater tot hotdish. It’s the one thing all four of us will eat without a discussion.
Kaylee had asked him the way she asks everything. Straight out and a little too fast. Like she wanted the question over with before she lost her nerve.
“Will you walk me out Thursday?”
And then Travis said the rest of it.
“I don’t want to take something that isn’t mine. That’s for your dad. If he ever shows up. It wouldn’t be right for me to stand in his spot.”
Kaylee is seventeen. She’s a senior. A middle hitter on the volleyball team. She’s worn the same long blond braid since the fourth grade, when she decided bangs were for babies.
She looked at him for maybe three seconds.
I watched her decide something behind her eyes.
Then she said, “Fine.”
Flat. Like the noon farm report on the radio.
She stood up. She rinsed her plate. She put it in the dishwasher the right way for once. And she went upstairs.
Her door didn’t slam.
I almost wished it had. You can argue with a slammed door.
Mason is eight. He’s Travis’s boy and mine. Kaylee’s half brother. Though nobody in our house has ever once used the word half about anything.
He had ketchup on his chin. And his eyes on me.
He was waiting for me to fix it.
That’s what I do in our family. I’m the one who calls the coach. Finds the permission slip. Knows where the good scissors are hiding.
I didn’t say a word.
I picked up the hotdish pan. I scraped the corner pieces into a Tupperware. I snapped the lid on.
And I did not say one single word to my husband.
I’ve gone over that silence a hundred times since then. And I want to tell it honestly. Because the easy version of this story makes me look a lot better than I was that night.
