My husband of thirteen years walked into our living room with another woman while I was setting the phone timer for our Christmas card, and she looked me over and said, “You weren’t lying about her.” He left me with our kids and a promise of $900 a month. Thirty-one months later, I saw them both again.
Teagan, six, and Landon, eight, were already on the rug in the snowflake pajamas I’d ordered in October.
Dexter’s spot behind them was empty, the phone propped on a stack of board games, blinking.
Then the front door opened and cold came in with him.
And with her.
Taller than him in her boots, camel coat, a smile that went up on one side only.
“You weren’t lying about her, darling,” she said, looking from my hair down to my socks. “She really LET HERSELF GO. Good cheekbones, though.”
The phone clicked and took the picture anyway.
“Excuse me?” I said.
Dexter rubbed his eyes like I was the chore he’d come home for.
“Stacy, I WANT A DIVORCE.”
Landon looked at me, then at her, then at his feet.
“In front of them?” I said. “What about the kids? Our whole life?”
“You’ll be fine, I’ll send money,” he said, already unwinding his scarf. “Take the couch or go to your sister’s. Kendall’s staying over.”
The oven timer went off for the cinnamon rolls and nobody moved.
I didn’t take the couch.
Snow boots over the pajamas, one bag each, and we were at Beatriz’s by ten.
The divorce took eleven months. We sold the house and moved into a rented duplex in Romeoville.
The $900 came on the first of the month for a while, then late, then never.
He stopped calling on Sundays, then on birthdays, and Teagan quit asking if the ringing phone was him.
Thirty-one months and he never once saw them.
One Thursday in March, coming up from the bus stop with grocery bags cutting my fingers, I saw Dexter and Kendall across the street.
Every step closer, I got surer that karma is REAL.
I set the bags down on the sidewalk and called my mother.
“Mom. You are NOT going to believe this.”
The couch on the curb
“They’re getting thrown out,” I said. “Mom, they’re being evicted. Their stuff is all over the sidewalk.”
That was what I was looking at. Trash bags. A microwave with the cord wrapped around it. A flat-screen face down in the slush by the parking meter.
And our couch. The gray sectional from the old living room, the one he’d told me to take or leave, sitting in front of the laundromat on the corner three blocks from our duplex.
A man in a brown work jacket was drilling the lock out of the door beside the laundromat, the one that goes up to the apartments.
Kendall stood by the couch in the same camel coat. The hem was dark from the slush. She was holding a lampshade with no lamp.
Dexter was trying to shove a dresser into the bed of a black pickup with paper plates in the back window.
“Which couch?” Mom said.
“Ours. From the house.”
“He kept that ugly thing?”
“The judge gave him the furniture. I wanted the kids.”
Mom said she was putting her shoes on. She lives in Kankakee. She doesn’t drive on the interstate after three.
“Don’t you go over there, Stacy,” she said. “You hear me? You walk home.”
I picked up the bags. The handles had left white lines across my fingers, and the frozen peas were sweating through the paper. I was going to walk past on my side of the street, like any other Thursday.
Then Kendall looked up.
She put the lampshade down on the couch. She looked at my bags, then at the bus shelter behind me, then at my face.
“Stacy?” she said. “What are you doing in Romeoville?”
The tooth calendar
The dental office where I work the front desk gives out free calendars every January. Twelve months of a cartoon tooth holding a toothbrush, smiling. Patients take them by the handful. I took one.
The first January, I hung it on a nail in Beatriz’s spare room, over the sofa bed where the kids and I slept in a pile. Teagan still had a snow boot on when she fell asleep the first night. I didn’t have the heart to wake her and pull it off.
Landon lay on his back with his eyes open.
“Is Dad sending the money tomorrow?” he said.
He’d heard every word in that living room. He’d heard I’ll send money and filed it like a promise.
“Not tomorrow,” I said. “But he’ll send it.”
Beatriz knew a lawyer from her church named Griffin Ngo, a quiet man with a Honda that smelled like coffee, who did the whole divorce for $1,500 in payments. The first thing he told me was to write everything down.
“Every month,” he said. “The months it comes and the months it doesn’t. Especially those.”
So the tooth calendar became the ledger.
In court, Dexter wore the navy suit I’d bought him for his cousin’s wedding. He stood up in front of Judge Bui and said, “Your Honor, my kids will never want for anything.” He offered the $900 himself, out loud, like he was leaving a tip. Griffin told me in the hallway the guidelines said more. I said I wanted it done.
The judgment came in the mail on cream paper, eleven pages. Page four said the payments go by transfer to the Petitioner’s account ending 0419. That’s my credit union account. I opened it when I was nineteen with a check from my grandmother, and I have never once changed it.
I kept the judgment in a folder in the kitchen drawer, under the calendars.
The first nine squares say $900, D, on the first, in blue pen.
The next four say $900, K FITZGERALD, and a date. The twelfth. The fifteenth. The twentieth. I didn’t ask whose account that was. Money for shoes is money for shoes.
After that, every square on the first of the month says $0, because Griffin said especially those.
I wrote eighteen of them.
I also kept an envelope in the freezer behind the waffles, marked L, braces. Twenty dollars at a time, sometimes forty. Dr. Rafael said with my employee discount Landon’s would run $2,100, and by that March I had $1,640 in there.
The calls stopped the way the money did. First he’d say he was between things. Then he’d say I’d be fine. Then the phone just didn’t ring on Sundays, and the kids stopped jumping when it did.
And the Christmas card picture was still on my phone. Me with my mouth open, the kids looking at a woman in a camel coat. I never sent the cards. I never deleted it, either.
Eighteen squares at $900 is $16,200. I can do that without a pencil.
K FITZGERALD. I’d written that name on my calendar four times and never once said it out loud.
Cesar’s drill
I should have walked home. I crossed the street.
The man with the drill saw me coming with my bags and must have thought I was family. He stopped drilling.
“You with them?” he said. “Because I’m owed December, January, February. They moved in November, paid November, and that’s it. I got the sheriff’s paper right here.”
“November,” I said.
“Fourth of November. I have it on the lease.”
Four months. Three blocks. Teagan’s school is between his door and mine. The bus I take every morning at 6:40 goes right past that laundromat.
Dexter got the dresser in the truck and turned around, and he looked at me the way he used to look at the furnace when it made a noise.
“Oh, perfect,” he said. “Great. This is what I need.”
He’d gotten heavier in the face. He had on a Bears hoodie I didn’t know.
“You live here?” I said.
“I don’t live anywhere, apparently. Ask Cesar.” He waved at the drill. “Don’t start, Stacy. I’m not doing this on the street.”
“Teagan’s school is right there.”
“I know where the school is.”
Kendall was standing very still behind the couch.
“You owe them sixteen thousand two hundred dollars,” I said.
He laughed. It came out of him like a cough.
“Get in line,” he said. “Get in line behind Cesar. Get in line behind Verizon. You think I’ve got sixteen thousand dollars in this truck?”
“You’ve got a truck.”
“It’s a buddy’s truck.”
“It’s got paper plates.”
“Okay, it’s my truck, and I need it to work, and if you want to take my truck you can talk to a judge.” He threw a trash bag into the bed so hard it split and a bunch of hangers came out. “You always do this. You find the one thing.”
“Dex,” Kendall said. “What does she mean, Teagan’s school is right there?”
“Kendall, get the lamp.”
“Where did you think they were?” I said to her.
She opened her mouth.
Dexter stepped between us and picked up one end of the sectional, then put it down again, because nobody was on the other end.
“You want something from me?” he said. “Take the couch. Offer’s still open.”
The camel coat
He drove off with the dresser and a load of bags, to a garage in Lockport, he said, and told Kendall to sit on the stuff so nobody took it.
So she sat on the couch, on the sidewalk, in March.
Cesar went back to drilling. The laundromat door kept opening and letting out warm air that smelled like dryer sheets, and a lady with a cart of folded towels went around us twice.
I should have gone home. The peas were done for anyway.
“I’m not trying to start anything,” Kendall said, without looking at me. “I just thought you were in Indiana.”
“Why would I be in Indiana?”
“Your mom’s place. He said you took the kids to your mom’s in Indiana and changed your number.” She was picking at a button on the coat. “He said you wouldn’t let him see them. He cried about it. On Father’s Day he sat in the truck and cried.”
“My mom lives in Kankakee,” I said.
She looked at me then.
“He said you blocked him everywhere. Me too. That’s why I couldn’t just send it to you anymore. He said you changed banks so he couldn’t—” She stopped. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
“Send what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Her phone buzzed. She looked at it and put it face down on her knee. Up close her coat had a coffee stain on the lapel, and the lining was coming out at one cuff.
“Changed banks,” I said.
“That’s what he said.”
“I’ve had the same account since I was nineteen.”
She sat there. Cesar’s drill whined and then stopped, and the old lock fell out on the step.
Thursdays, Beatriz picks the kids up from school and keeps them till six. It was four-twenty. My kitchen was empty, and the folder was in the drawer.
I picked up the grocery bags.
“My place is three blocks that way,” I said. “Bring your phone.”
She looked at the couch, at the trash bags, at the corner where the truck had gone.
Then she got up and followed me.
I held our front door open, and Kendall Fitzgerald walked into my kitchen.
Memo: T + L
I didn’t take her coat. I put the peas in the freezer, next to the envelope, and shut it.
Then I took the folder and the calendars out of the drawer and laid them on the table, one year next to the next, the tooth smiling on every page.
Kendall leaned over them with her hands in her pockets.
She found it fast. Her own name, in my blue pen, four times.
“That’s me,” she said.
“That’s you.”
“Those were the first ones. His account got frozen, he said, something with the IRS, so he set it up on my phone. To you. I watched him type it in.” She touched the twelfth with one finger. “I was late on that one. I was waiting on payroll.”
“And then?”
“Then he said you’d blocked my number and changed banks, and I should send it to him and he’d get it to you some other way. Cash. He said you wanted cash.”
She took her phone out. Her hands were red from the cold and she had to try her code twice.
She turned the screen toward me and scrolled.
It was all there, the twenty-eighth of every month, the same amount, the same memo.
$900.00 to STACY FARLEY. Memo: T + L.
Four of those.
Then the name changed.
$900.00 to DEXTER FARLEY. Memo: T + L.
She kept scrolling and it kept going. She counted them with her fingernail tapping the glass, out loud, like a kid counting stairs. When she got to eighteen she stopped and started over, and got eighteen again.
I opened the folder to page four and turned it around so she could read account ending 0419.
Then I opened my credit union app and showed her the account number. Same four digits. Opened the year she started first grade.
“He never changed anything,” Kendall said. “You never changed anything.”
“No.”
“I paid it.” She sat down in Landon’s chair without asking. “I paid your kids’ support. For a year and a half. I’d skip lunch on the twenty-eighth so I wouldn’t overdraw.”
“Where did he say the rent went?”
“To Cesar. I gave him rent every month too.” She laughed and it wasn’t a laugh. “He hasn’t had a job since the heating place let him go. Two summers ago. He said the truck was a bonus from a side thing. Fourteen thousand cash, in August. He counted it on the bed.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say that the calendar wasn’t already saying.
She kept scrolling, down to the top, to the newest one.
She held it out so I could read it.
February twenty-eighth. Three weeks ago.
$900.00 to DEXTER FARLEY. Memo: T + L.
Courtroom 405
I called Griffin Ngo from the bus stop the next morning at 6:35.
He listened all the way through and said, “Can you get me those screenshots?”
I texted Kendall. I didn’t know if she’d answer. At 1:10 the next night my phone lit up twenty-two times in a row, one picture each, and then one more text that said I’m at my cousin’s in Plainfield. Tell me where to be.
Griffin filed a petition for a rule to show cause. He needed $1,500 up front this time, because, he said, this was a different thing and his landlord didn’t take payments either.
I took the envelope out of the freezer, from behind the waffles. It was cold and a little damp. I counted out fifteen hundred on the kitchen table and put the hundred and forty back.
Landon came in for juice while I was doing it and looked at the money and the envelope with his initial on it, and then at his feet, and went back out.
The hearing was three weeks later, a Tuesday, in front of Judge Bui again. Same courtroom. Same flag. Dexter wore the navy suit, and it pulled across the shoulders now.
He talked first, and he talked the longest.
“Your Honor, I want to say up front I have done my best. I’ve been out of work. Everybody knows the economy. She took my kids to Indiana, she changed her number, she blocked me, and now she shows up with a lawyer like I’m some kind of deadbeat. I have tried. I have sent money every single month. Every month. You can ask anybody.”
Griffin handed up the calendar pages, the judgment open to page four, and the screenshots, stapled in order.
The judge read them. It took a while. Dexter kept talking while she read.
“Those payments, those were gifts. Kendall gave me that money as a gift. That’s my money. That’s between me and her. I don’t even know what this is. She’s had my kids out of state.”
“Mr. Farley,” the judge said. “Where do you currently reside?”
“Romeoville. Temporarily. I’m between places.”
“And where do your children reside?”
“I don’t know where she lives, Your Honor. That’s the whole point. She won’t tell me.”
Griffin looked at me.
“Three blocks,” I said.
Then Griffin called Kendall up from the back row. She had on a gray sweater, no camel coat. She held on to the rail with both hands.
“I sent it for the kids,” she said. “He changed who it went to. He told me she’d changed banks.”
“She did change banks,” Dexter said. “Ask her. Kendall, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about my family. She is lying to you. She has always been a liar. Look at her. She sat in my house for thirteen years and did nothing and now she wants my truck?”
“Mr. Farley,” the judge said.
“I’m just saying. Thirteen years.”
Judge Bui found him in arrears of $16,200. Sixty days to pay it in full, or report to the county jail, and then wage withholding on anything he ever earned after that. She said the truck’s title would do as a start. She said it without looking up.
In the hallway he caught up to us at the elevators. Kendall stood a little behind me. I don’t think either of us decided that.
“You’re happy,” he said. “You’re happy now. You two. That’s cute.” He looked at Kendall. “You let yourself go too, you know that? You’re going to end up just like her.”
Kendall pressed the button again even though it was already lit.
He turned back to me. His face was red at the collar.
“Sixty days,” he said. “Over a Christmas card you didn’t even send.”
Two days before Christmas
He sold the truck in May. The State Disbursement Unit sends the money now, in a white envelope with a window, and I keep the stub on the fridge under the magnet shaped like a tooth.
The tooth calendar on the nail by the back door has numbers in every square this year.
Dr. Rafael put Landon’s braces on in June. He picked blue bands. Then red for the Fourth. Now green, for Christmas, he says, though he won’t stop showing them to the cashier at Jewel.
Kendall sent one text in September. A picture of a new account, a new bank, her name on it. Just mine, it said. I hearted it. That was all.
The pajamas are a size up. Same snowflakes. I ordered them in October.
The kids were on the rug in the living room of the duplex, in front of a tree that leaned left no matter what we did to it. The phone was propped on the board games, Candy Land on the bottom, Sorry on top.
The spot behind them was empty.
I set the timer for ten seconds and ran for it in my socks.
“Smile with your teeth,” Landon said. “Mom. Teeth. Like me.”
I sat down behind them and put a hand on each of their shoulders, and Teagan leaned back into my knees, and the phone blinked faster.
“Here it comes,” Teagan said.
The phone clicked.
“Again,” she said. “Landon blinked.”
If you’ve ever kept a calendar of what somebody owed your kids, send this to the person who sat with you while you filled it in.
For more family drama involving money and painful betrayals, read about a mother who spent her daughter’s $46,300 house fund and a son-in-law who locked down a barn before a $640,000 auction. And for another complicated family clash, see the sister-in-law who called a grieving woman’s guest a stray.
