I’m going to tell you about the next few years quickly. Because they were hard, and I don’t like to sit in them too long.
I got a lawyer through Indiana Legal Services, a sweet young woman named Monica who worked out of an office above a pawn shop and didn’t charge me a dime. She got the divorce done. She got a judge to order Ray to pay child support. Eleven hundred dollars a month, for six kids.
Ray paid exactly three times. Then he moved to Manila and stopped.
Monica filed with the state child support enforcement office. They intercepted one tax refund. Then he stopped filing taxes in the United States altogether. By the time Eliza turned eighteen, Ray owed me over a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in back child support.
I never saw a penny of it.
So I worked.
I left the dentist’s office because it didn’t pay enough. I got a job as a cook in the cafeteria at Northrop High School, so I’d have the same schedule as my kids. Then I worked my way up to cafeteria manager. And three nights a week, from six until midnight, I did medical billing for the hospital on Lake Avenue. I learned insurance codes. I learned how to fight with Medicaid on the phone. I learned how to sleep four hours a night.
When the furnace died, I refinanced the house. When Caleb needed braces, I took a loan against my retirement account at the school district. When Jason broke his arm playing football and the hospital bill came, I set up a payment plan and paid forty dollars a month for three years.
I never once missed a mortgage payment. Not one. Twenty-two years.
I was at every football game. Every band concert. Every parent-teacher conference. I sat on hard bleachers at the Kingsland Community Center every Saturday morning for basketball, for volleyball, for the Christmas pageant where Sarah was a sheep two years in a row.
And slowly, one at a time, my six children grew up.
Mark became an accountant. He’s thirty-six now. Married, two kids, a house in Huntertown. He’s my serious one. The one who took over being the man of the house at sixteen and never really stopped. He still calls me every Sunday at four o’clock to ask if I’ve paid my property taxes.
Jason became an electrician. He’s my funny one. He tells stories that make no sense and somehow everybody laughs anyway. He has a big truck and a big beard and a heart like a golden retriever.
Caleb is my quiet one. He’s a physical therapist. He reads books on his lunch break and remembers everything you ever tell him.
Sarah is my fierce one. A nurse in the emergency department at Parkview. She doesn’t take anything from anybody. She’s the one I’d want next to me in a bar fight, if I were the kind of sixty-year-old woman who got into bar fights.
Eliza, my baby, is twenty-seven. She teaches second grade. She still crawls into my bed sometimes when she comes home for the weekend.
And then there’s Grant.
Grant is twenty-nine. He was ten when his father left. And of all my children, he’s the one it broke the worst.
Before Ray left, Grant was a sweet, goofy little boy who followed his dad everywhere. After Ray left, he got angry. And he stayed angry for a very long time.
He got into fights at school. He got suspended in seventh grade. At fifteen, he got picked up by the police for spray-painting the back wall of a Kroger. At seventeen, he crashed my car into a mailbox at two in the morning. He dropped out of community college twice.
I’ve spent more nights waiting up for Grant than for the other five combined. More nights lying in bed staring at the ceiling, listening for his key in the door. More nights jumping every time the phone rang, sure it was a police officer or a hospital calling to tell me something terrible.
So when I opened my door on my sixtieth birthday and found a police officer holding a note in Grant’s handwriting, I want you to understand.
My mind went to the worst place it had ever gone.
“Ma’am,” the officer said again, on my porch. “I need you to come with me.”
I looked back over my shoulder into my house.
The table was set. Seven places. The food was waiting under foil. The candles were burning down to nothing.
“My children were supposed to be here tonight,” I heard myself say. “It’s my birthday. I’m sixty today.”
He hesitated.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
I’m sorry.
That’s what they say. On TV. In the movies. That’s exactly what they say, right before they tell you.
I should have called Mark right then. Or Sarah. Sarah would have known what to do. She works in an emergency room. She deals with police officers every night of her life.
But the note said don’t call anyone.
So I grabbed my cardigan off the hook by the door. I locked the front door out of pure habit, with my hands shaking so hard I missed the keyhole twice. And I walked down my front steps and got into the back seat of a police cruiser for the first time in my entire life.
The back seat was hard plastic. It smelled like disinfectant and old fear. There was a metal cage between me and the front.
The door shut with a heavy, final click that made my whole stomach drop.
The officer got into the driver’s seat and pulled away from the curb.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Not far, ma’am.”
“Not far where?”
He glanced up at me in the rearview mirror.
“Someplace safe.”
“Safe from what?” My voice was rising. I couldn’t stop it. “Did Grant get hurt? Is he in trouble? Did he do something?”
“Ma’am,” he said calmly. “Please.”
“Don’t ‘please’ me, young man. I’m his mother. Just tell me if my son is okay.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“You’ll have answers soon,” he said. “I promise.”
