Speakerphone

Sadie was at the kitchen table when he called.

A Tuesday in March, a bowl of chili going cold in front of her. Outside the window, the snow along the fence line was gray and crusted, the way it gets in South Dakota in March when winter has forgotten how to end.

Her phone buzzed on the table next to her bowl. She looked at the screen. Dad.

She smiled. She always smiles when he calls. Even after eleven years.

She put him on speaker, the way she always does.

She does that so I can hear. She’s done it since she was little. I used to think it was because she wanted me to be part of it. Now I think it’s because she didn’t want to be alone with whatever he was going to say.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, kiddo.” Rory’s voice came out of the little speaker, crackly. He was in his truck. I could hear the heater fan going and the radio low in the background. “How’s school?”

“Fine. We had a sub in chemistry. She didn’t know anything.”

“That’s how you get to go home early,” Rory said. “Teach the sub something.”

Sadie laughed. A real laugh.

Then there was a pause on the line. Just a second too long.

“Listen, Sade,” he said. “About prom.”

She’d asked him two weeks before. On a Sunday, at the end of a weekend visit. Standing in his driveway in Mitchell with her backpack on her shoulder, while Tasha watched from the kitchen window.

Dad, can you help me with a dress for prom? It’s in April.

He’d said he’d think about it. He’d said he’d call.

Now he was calling.

“Kiddo, I can’t swing a dress this year,” he said. “Welding’s been slow since Christmas. I’m only getting three days a week at the shop. I’m sorry.”

Sadie looked down at her chili.

“That’s fine, Dad,” she said.

“I feel bad about it.”

“It’s fine, Dad,” she said again. “It’s totally fine. I’ll figure something out.”

She said it was fine twice.

They talked for another minute. About the Twins’ spring training. About his truck, which needed new brakes. About whether she’d heard back from South Dakota State.

Then he said he had to go, he was pulling into the gas station, love you, kiddo.

“Love you too, Dad.”

She hung up. She sat there for a second looking at her phone.

Then she got up. She rinsed her bowl in the sink. Most of the chili went down the drain. She set the bowl in the drying rack.

Then she went upstairs.

I sat at the kitchen table by myself.

I wanted to go up after her. I didn’t. I know my daughter. When she goes upstairs like that, quiet, she doesn’t want company. She wants to lie on her bed with her earbuds in and stare at the ceiling until whatever it is stops hurting.

I knew it was going to hurt. I knew the second he said kiddo in that voice.

I cleaned up the kitchen. I put the chili in a Tupperware. I wiped down the counters twice.

Then I sat down at the table with my laptop and looked at the balance in my checking account.

Four hundred and twelve dollars.

Rent was due Friday.

Chapter Two: 9:40 P.M.

At 9:40 that night, his wife Tasha posted a picture.

I saw it because I was in bed scrolling on my phone, the way you do when you can’t sleep. Tasha and I aren’t friends. But we’re friends on Facebook, the way people in small towns are. You click accept and then you forget about it.

The picture came up at the top of my feed.

Her daughter, Madison, also seventeen, in a six-hundred-dollar gown from Sioux Falls.

A long, fitted dress, champagne gold, with sequins all over it that caught the light. A slit up one side. Thin straps. Madison was standing in front of a three-way mirror in a bridal shop, with her blonde hair down, smiling over her shoulder at the camera.

Tasha’s caption said: Found THE dress! Madison’s going to be the prettiest girl at Mitchell prom. Thank you Boutique 605!

I knew what it cost. Boutique 605 is the fancy dress store in Sioux Falls, on Phillips Avenue downtown. Everybody in eastern South Dakota knows it. Their prom dresses start at four hundred dollars.

Rory had commented under it.

Right there. The first comment. Posted eight minutes after the picture went up. Four hours after he told our daughter he couldn’t swing a dress.

Beautiful girl. So proud.

I lay there in the dark and read it three times.

Beautiful girl. So proud.

I tried to remember the last time Rory had commented on a picture of Sadie. I scrolled back on his page. I went back a month. Two months. Six.

Nothing. Not one comment. Not on her homecoming picture in September. Not on her picture with her volleyball trophy in November. Not on the picture I posted on her seventeenth birthday in January.

He’d hearted a few of them. That was all. A little red heart, no words.

I heard Sadie’s door close very softly.

Across the hall. I’d thought she was asleep. Her light had been off for an hour. But I heard her door open, and I heard her go into the bathroom, and I heard the water run.

Then I heard her door close again. Very softly. The way you close a door when you don’t want anybody to know you were awake.

She’d seen it.

Of course she’d seen it. She’s seventeen. Her phone is her whole world. She follows Tasha. She follows Madison. She follows her dad.

She saw her stepsister in a six-hundred-dollar dress. And she saw her father’s comment underneath.

Beautiful girl. So proud.

I got up. I stood outside her door in the dark hallway with my hand on the doorknob.

I could hear her breathing on the other side. Not crying. Just breathing. Slow and careful, the way you breathe when you’re trying very hard not to cry.

I didn’t open the door.

I went back to bed. I lay there until two in the morning staring at the ceiling.

Chapter Three: Eleven Years

I did not call him.

I want that understood. I had my phone in my hand at two in the morning with his name pulled up. My thumb was right over the call button. I could have called him and woken him up and said everything I’d been holding in for eleven years.

I didn’t.

I have been divorced from Rory for eleven years, and I know every way that call goes.

I know exactly how it goes if I call him angry. He gets defensive. He says I’m always trying to make him the bad guy. He says I don’t understand how hard it is. He says Tasha’s money is Tasha’s money and he doesn’t control what she spends it on.

Then he hangs up. And then he doesn’t call Sadie for two weeks. And Sadie thinks it’s her fault.

I know exactly how it goes if I call him calm. He agrees with everything I say. He says he’ll fix it. He says he’ll call Sadie. He says he’s sorry.

Then he doesn’t. And Sadie thinks it’s her fault.

Rory and I got married when we were twenty-two. In the Lutheran church in Howard, where his mother did the hair of every woman in town. Sadie was born when we were twenty-five.

He was a good husband for about five years. He was a welder at a trailer manufacturer in Madison. He was funny. He could fix anything. He used to put Sadie on his shoulders at the county fair so she could see the tractor pull.

Then he started staying late at the bar after work. Then he started not coming home. Then, when Sadie was six, I found the messages from Tasha on his phone.

We were divorced eight months later.

He moved to Mitchell. He married Tasha two years after that. She had a daughter, Madison, the same age as Sadie. Six months younger.

He got Sadie every other weekend. He paid child support. Six hundred and twelve dollars a month, through the state. The Department of Social Services takes it right out of his paycheck.

He’s never missed a payment. I’ll give him that. Eleven years. Not one.

But he missed everything else.

He missed her first piano recital. He missed most of her volleyball games. He missed her eighth-grade graduation because Madison had a dance competition in Sioux Falls the same day.

He calls on her birthday. Most years. He sends a card with a twenty in it.

He takes her every other weekend. Usually. When he’s not working. When Madison doesn’t have something.

He loves her. I believe that. I’ve always believed that.

He just loves her from a distance. Like she’s a picture on a wall that he walks past every day and doesn’t really see.

 

 

Click here to continue reading PART 2: My Daughter’s Father Said He Couldn’t Afford Her Prom Dress, but That Same Night He Bought His Stepdaughter a $600 Gown