When our fourth round of fertility treatments failed, my husband said, “Some women just aren’t built for it, Gina,” and told me we couldn’t spare another $14,000. Two weeks later, the first thing Amazon showed me under Buy It Again was a box of size 5 diapers.
Fourteen years married. Six of them spent giving myself shots in the stomach at the kitchen table.
We don’t have kids.
The diapers had gone to 1418 Fenner Road, forty minutes from our house. The delivery note said, “Please knock, don’t ring. Baby sleeping.”
Travis drives freight. Tuesday to Thursday he’s on the road, and every night he’s gone he checks my location before bed. I used to think that was sweet.
I went looking.
SIXTY-ONE archived orders to that address, going back to 2015. Girls’ school shoes. A race-car toddler bed with a gift note: “Happy birthday buddy. Love, DADDY.”
I put the iPad back in the junk drawer and made his supper.
Tuesday night he kissed my forehead at the door. “Joplin run. Back Thursday, babe.”
I gave him ten minutes and took the back way.
I parked behind the Baptist church, next to a van with a flat tire, and walked up through the wet yard in the dark.
Their front window was the only light on the road.
Four kids in pajamas were piled on a couch pushed right up against the glass.
MY COUCH.
The beige one from my dad’s house. The one Travis swore he hauled to the dump in August.
The oldest girl was maybe twelve, holding a sleeping baby on her lap.
The two little ones had both hands flat on the glass, staring past me at the road.
I’ve driven a school bus nine years. I know what kids look like when they’re WAITING ON THEIR DADDY.
My phone lit up in my hand.
“Why is your phone on Fenner Road?”
Behind me, headlights swung in off the county road.
The two little ones pressed closer to the glass.
The oldest never looked up from the baby.
Ten fifty-eight
The headlights were my husband’s.
White Silverado, the dent in the tailgate from the post at the feed store, coming up Fenner Road way too fast for a wet night.
My truck, if you want to get technical. My name is on the loan. I make the payments, $612 a month out of my checking account, fifty-six of them so far.
He’d have stopped at the QuikTrip on the highway for a Dr Pepper. He always did. That was the only reason I got there first.
I stepped back behind a cedar at the edge of the yard, and his lights slid across the grass right where I’d been standing.
He pulled in hard and got out without shutting his door. He didn’t go to the house. He stood in the driveway in the rain with his phone to his ear and looked at the yard, then the road, then the dark church at the bottom of the hill.
My phone buzzed against my leg. I pressed it flat into my jeans so the screen wouldn’t show.
Then the front door opened and the little boy came flying out onto the porch in his pajamas. “Daddy!”
Travis put the phone in his pocket. He went up the steps and swung that boy onto his hip like he’d done it a thousand times. I guess he had.
Through the window, the oldest girl got up off my dad’s couch and handed him the baby. She didn’t look at him either. She walked down the hall, and the little girl trailed after her with one hand on the wall.
He stood in the middle of that living room with the baby on his shoulder and patted her back, slow. The same way he patted mine in the recovery room after every egg retrieval.
Four kids had waited up for him. As soon as the baby settled, he came to the window.
He looked out into the dark, right at my cedar. I don’t know what he saw. Rain on the glass, probably, and his own face.
He pulled the curtains shut.
I stood there till the porch light went off. Then I walked down along the ditch so my shoes wouldn’t crunch the gravel, and at the end of the driveway I stopped at the mailbox.
Black metal, with the stick-on letters you buy at the hardware store. Two of them were peeling.
T & E STROUD.
The junk drawer
It’s forty minutes back to Delmar Street the back way. I couldn’t tell you one mile of it.
The house was dark. It’s my dad’s house, the one I grew up in. He left it to me in 2018, along with $61,000 of life insurance and that beige couch, which he bought in 1998 and never once let anybody eat on.
I didn’t turn on a light. I sat down at the kitchen table where I’d done six years of shots and pulled open the junk drawer.
Rubber bands. Dad’s reading glasses. A flashlight with no batteries. Takeout menus from places that closed years ago. And the picture from our wedding, the one the chapel lady in Eureka Springs printed while we waited.
June 2011. Me in a yellow sundress, Travis in a tie he borrowed off a hook by the chapel door. Our witness was the chapel lady’s husband. Nobody from his side came.
“Mama’s got the flu,” he said that morning. When I wanted to wait a month for her, he said Arkansas didn’t make you wait for anything. You sign at the courthouse at nine and you’re married by lunch.
His mama never did get over that flu, far as I could tell. Fourteen Easters at Doris Stroud’s table, and she never once called me her daughter-in-law.
“This is Travis’s friend Gina,” she’d tell the cousins. I used to laugh about it in the car on the way home. Travis laughed too.
He was easy to love. People don’t want to hear that part, but he was. He showed up. Every egg retrieval, he was in the plastic chair beside my bed with a Dr Pepper and a bag of peanut M&M’s for when they let me eat. He set up the location sharing on my phone in 2014, in case my bus ever broke down on some gravel road.
Dad’s money went where we decided together. Nine thousand down on the truck in 2021, with the loan in my name because his credit was “still a mess from his twenties.” Thirty-eight thousand on four rounds at the clinic in Springfield. The last $14,000 sat in savings for round five.
Travis did the bills. I drove a bus and did the shots.
I kept the hospital wristbands from every retrieval in that drawer. Four of them, rubber-banded together. Don’t ask me why. You keep things.
I dug through the drawer for them.
They weren’t there. I took everything out and laid it on the table and went through it twice.
In August I’d bought a gray sectional with my tax refund, and Travis said he’d haul Dad’s couch to the dump. He came back in an hour with the truck bed empty and a sunburn on one arm. I made him a sandwich.
I was still sitting there with the drawer dumped out on the table when my phone lit up. 12:47 a.m.
“It’s not what you think. They’re Erica’s kids. I’ll explain Thursday.”
The credit union
Wednesday I drove my route like nothing happened. Route 14, forty-one stops, first pickup at 6:20.
I count heads at every stop, on and off. You do it nine years, you do it in your sleep. At the Hickory Lane stop a girl about twelve got on holding her little brother by the hood of his coat, and I lost count and had to start over.
I called my sister from the bus barn at 8:15. Laurie’s been divorced six years, and she doesn’t waste words on a phone.
“Pull the bank statements before he does,” she said. “And call Pete Hammond on the square. He did mine.”
The credit union opened at nine. The teller printed the savings history and slid it to me under the glass.
May 12. Cashier’s check, $14,000.00. Payee: Ozark Roofing & Gutter.
Balance: $211.06.
In September, in the clinic parking lot, he’d held my hand and told me we couldn’t spare another $14,000. He was right. He’d already spent it in May.
I asked the teller to take him off the account. She was sweet about it. Both signers had to come in for that.
So I took out the $211.06. Ten twenties, a ten, a one and six cents in a little paper envelope.
Ozark Roofing had their number on their website. A lady answered on the second ring.
“This is Mrs. Stroud,” I said. “I’m calling about the warranty on the roof we paid for in May.”
Keys clicked. “Fenner Road? Thirty-one squares, architectural shingles.” More keys. “Erica, honey, you already called about this in June.”
I hung up on her.
That night Travis called again, and this time I answered.
He had it all ready. Erica was his cousin, his Uncle Ken’s girl. Her husband walked out on her with four kids, and he’d been helping her for years, and he never told me because of everything with the shots. “I didn’t want to rub it in your face, babe.”
“Love, Daddy,” I said.
“Brayden doesn’t have one. What was I supposed to sign it, Uncle Travis?”
“And the roof?”
He didn’t even slow down. “I loaned her the money. She’s paying it back. I was going to tell you when she got square.”
Then his voice changed. “You followed me out there. You went through my orders. You stood out in the yard where those kids sleep, Gina. Do you hear yourself? That’s the hormones talking.”
I set the phone face down on the table and sat there till almost midnight. Then I typed Erica Stroud into Facebook.
Most of it was private. The intro said she worked at Cedar Hill Nursing & Rehab. The few pictures anybody could see were her in purple scrubs in a parked car at seven in the morning, holding a gas station coffee.
Her profile picture was four kids on my dad’s couch.
Purple scrubs
Thursday I called in sick to the bus barn. First sick day I’d taken in three years.
At 6:50 I was parked two rows over from a maroon Corolla with a car seat in the back. Cedar Hill is one long brick building off the highway, with a flag out front and a bench by the side door where the aides smoke.
At 7:04 she came out that side door in purple scrubs with a lunch cooler and her keys already in her hand. She was younger than me. Shorter. She walked like her feet hurt.
I got out of my car. “Erica?”
She stopped. She looked at my face, then my hands, then my face again.
“I’m Gina,” I said.
People have looked at me a lot of ways in forty-two years. Nobody ever looked at me like that.
“You’re supposed to be sick,” she said.
I didn’t understand her, and I told her so.
“Cancer,” she said. “Ovarian. He said you were his ex-wife, and you got sick, and you didn’t have anybody. He said that’s who calls him at night. That’s where the money goes.”
Her keys were shaking in her hand.
“Our church has had you on the prayer list for six years,” she said. “By name.”
“I’m not sick,” I said.
“He showed me your hospital bracelets.” Her voice went up. “One time I didn’t believe him, and he went out to the truck and came back with your hospital bracelets.”
I put my hand around my own wrist like there was still something on it.
“Those are from egg retrievals,” I said. “Four of them. At a fertility clinic in Springfield.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. A man in a Cedar Hill polo came out to the bench and lit a cigarette and looked at us and looked away.
“He said you didn’t have anybody,” she said again, quieter. “He said he was all you had.”
I had a sister who answers on the first ring and a bus full of kids every morning. I’d thought I had him too.
“He drives Thursdays through Mondays,” she said. “Overnights to Tulsa.”
“Tuesdays through Thursdays,” I said. “Overnights to Joplin.”
She looked at the car seat in her back window for a while. Then she unlocked her doors.
“My mama’s got the kids till noon,” she said.
She opened the passenger door and swept a pile of coloring books onto the floor so I could sit.
The booth by the window
We drove to the Waffle House on the highway and took the booth by the window, because it was the only one with nobody in it.
She ordered coffee and didn’t drink it. I didn’t order anything. The waitress left us alone like she’d seen two women in a booth before.
Erica had a thin gold band on. So did I. We both looked at them at the same time.
“When did y’all split up?” she said. “He never would tell me the year.”
“We didn’t split up,” I said. “We got married. June 2011. Eureka Springs.”
She laughed one time. It didn’t sound like laughing.
She got her phone out and scrolled a long way back, then turned it around on the table. She’d taken the picture in 2023, for her REAL ID.
A marriage license. State of Missouri, the county courthouse, October 2010. His signature, with the same slanted T he puts on birthday cards. Hers under it.
Eight months before the chapel in Eureka Springs.
I did the math three times, like it might come out different.
“So you’re the wife,” I said.
Erica looked out the window at the highway. “Then what are you?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. I still don’t have a good one.
Arkansas didn’t make you wait for anything. And Doris had the flu.
“Does his mama know about me?” I said.
“Doris keeps my kids every Saturday.” Erica turned her cup around by the handle. “She was at the hospital for all four of them.”
Fourteen Easters. Travis’s friend Gina.
Then I asked her the thing I’d been carrying around since Tuesday.
“Your oldest,” I said. “The little ones were all over the glass. She never looked up at the road once.”
“Kenzie.” Erica almost smiled. “She’s twelve. She found a second phone in his glove box last winter, and he told her it was for work. She quit sitting up for his truck after that.”
“She was up Tuesday.”
“For Brayden and Sadie. They won’t go down till he’s home, and they won’t wait without her. And Hadley won’t sleep on anybody else.” She turned the cup again. “Kenzie sits on that couch for them. Not for him.”
A trucker at the counter paid for his eggs in quarters and stacked them in little towers first.
“He comes back to you tonight, doesn’t he?” Erica said. “Thursdays.”
“Nine-forty,” I said. “Like a clock.”
She put a five on the table for the coffee she never drank.
“Then I’ll be at your kitchen table at nine-thirty.”
My kitchen table
Erica pulled into my driveway at 9:26. She’d changed out of her scrubs into jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, and she had a sandwich bag in her hand. Her mama had the kids.
She pulled out Travis’s chair, looked at the Dr Pepper ring on the table in front of it, and sat across from it instead.
I’d laid everything out like a hand of cards. My license from Arkansas. A printout of hers. The roofing receipt. The truck title with my name on it. Sixty-one Amazon orders, printed on the bus barn’s printer.
Erica set the sandwich bag on top of the pile. Four hospital wristbands, rubber-banded together.
“They were in my kitchen drawer,” she said. “With the batteries.”
I put them in my pocket without looking at them.
At 9:41 the truck came up Delmar Street and turned into my driveway. Headlights across the front window, then nothing. His boots on the steps.
He came in with grocery-store roses, the $7.99 sticker still on the plastic. He saw Erica, and the roses went down by his leg.
“Erica,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Nobody answered him.
“Okay.” He put his keys on the counter. He put the roses on the counter. “Okay. E, whatever she told you, she’s not well. I told you she’s not well. Gina, honey, what did you say to her?”
“She didn’t have to say anything,” Erica said. “I can read.”
He looked at the table then. All of it.
And he talked. He talked for a long time. He was going to tell us both. It got away from him. It started before he knew what he was doing, and then there were babies, and then my dad died, and how does a man walk out on a woman whose daddy just died? Did we have any idea what it costs to keep two houses going on a driver’s pay? He never missed a birthday. Not one, on either side.
Erica and I didn’t say a word. We let him run till he ran out.
When he stopped, I asked him one thing.
“Why’d you say no to the fifth round?”
He rubbed his face with both hands. When he looked up, he looked tired, like I was the one who’d been keeping him up nights.
“Gina,” he said. “I’ve got four kids. What was I going to do with a fifth?”
Erica’s hand went to her mouth and stayed there. Mine stayed flat on the table. I couldn’t feel it.
I slid the truck title across the table to him.
“Keys,” I said.
He laughed. “That’s my truck.”
“My name. My dad’s nine thousand down. Fifty-six payments out of my checking.” I picked up my phone. “If it leaves my driveway tonight, I report it stolen. Pete Hammond has a copy of the title.”
He looked at Erica. Erica looked at the feed store calendar on my wall.
He grabbed his keys off the counter and threw them at the table. They skidded across the licenses and off the far edge and hit the floor. Nobody picked them up.
Then I opened the location settings on my phone, turned the screen so he could see it, and stopped sharing with him. Eleven years, and it took two taps.
“Your clothes are in trash bags on my porch,” Erica said. “Doris can come get them. You call me about the kids, and that’s all you call me about.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” he said.
Nobody answered that either.
“So what, you’re calling the cops?” He was looking at me. “That’s what this is?”
“That’s Erica’s call,” I said. “She’s the wife.”
Erica stood up. She put her hand on my shoulder for one second and took it back.
“I’ll pay you back for the roof,” she said. “However long it takes.”
“Keep the roof,” I said.
He called his mama from my front porch. I could hear him through the door. “Mama. Come get me. I’m at Gina’s. Just come.”
He went down the steps and stood in my wet yard and watched the road for her headlights.
Buy It Again
Pete Hammond’s office mailed the papers in August. The judge called the marriage void. Fourteen years, and on paper there was nothing to end. My bus roster says Gina Foley now, my dad’s name.
I sold the Silverado in March. The dent in the tailgate cost me four hundred dollars on the trade.
Erica never called the prosecutor. She said her kids already had plenty to explain at school, and Pete said that was hers to decide, so I let it be hers.
Travis lives in Doris’s basement. Erica tells me things like that. We text about once a week, mostly about the weather.
The first week of school I was back on Route 14, counting heads at Hickory Lane. That girl’s little brother sits by himself now.
Last Sunday I got the old iPad out of the junk drawer to order coffee filters.
Buy It Again: coffee filters, dish soap, a phone charger, and the prenatal vitamins from the clinic that I don’t take anymore.
I took Travis off the account. Two taps, same as the location.
That night Erica texted me a picture. The four of them on my dad’s couch, pushed back against the living room wall where a couch goes. The baby asleep on Kenzie. Nobody looking at the window.
Under it she wrote, “Kenzie wants to know if you want your dad’s couch back.”
I wrote back, “Tell her to keep it.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s ever been told some women just aren’t built for it.
Family secrets and money have a way of colliding – read about the daughter-in-law who claimed a family heirloom, a husband who secretly took money from his mother-in-law, and a son whose mother paid his mortgage.
