He was Sadie’s father, not mine to fix.

That’s what I told myself, lying there at two in the morning. That’s what my counselor told me, five years ago, when I was still crying about it every week.

You can’t make him be the father she needs, Jodi. You can only be the mother she needs.

And I couldn’t make him pay.

The child support was what the court ordered. Six hundred and twelve dollars a month. A prom dress isn’t in the court order. Neither is showing up.

But I knew who loved her.

I knew one person who’d never once missed anything. Not one birthday. Not one concert. Not one volleyball game. Not one Christmas.

At six in the morning, while Sadie was in the shower, I picked up my phone.

I called his mother instead.

Chapter Four: Darla

Darla Lindstrom is seventy-two.

She did hair in Howard for forty-one years. Darla’s Beauty Nook, in a little brick building on Main Street next to the bank. Two chairs, two dryers, a radio that only played KJAM out of Madison, and a coffee pot that was always on.

She retired three years ago. She sold the shop to a girl she trained. But she still does the hair of eleven women from the Lutheran church every Friday morning in her own kitchen, because they won’t let anybody else touch it.

She raised Rory by herself.

His father, Gene Lindstrom, left when Rory was seven. Drove to Rapid City one Friday for a job interview and never came back. Darla found out three months later that he had another family out there.

She raised Rory on what she made doing hair. Never took a dime from Gene, because Gene never sent one. She made Rory’s lunches and went to his Little League games and sat in the bleachers at his wrestling meets.

She bought him a suit for his own prom. I know because she told me once. At Christmas, a few years after the divorce. She said she did six extra perms that month to pay for it.

She has never once missed Sadie’s birthday, not even the year of the ice storm.

That was 2016. Sadie was eight. Her birthday’s in January. A storm came through eastern South Dakota the night before and coated everything in two inches of ice. Power lines down from Sioux Falls to Huron. They closed Interstate 90.

Darla drove anyway. From Howard to Salem. Twenty-two miles of county roads, in her old Buick, at fifteen miles an hour, with a birthday cake on the passenger seat.

It took her an hour and forty minutes. She got there at seven at night. The cake was perfect. Chocolate, with pink frosting and eight candles.

Rory called the next day. He said the roads were too bad to get out of Mitchell.

She answered on the second ring. She’s always up at five-thirty. She’s been getting up at five-thirty her whole life.

“Jodi?” she said. “Is everything all right? Is Sadie okay?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “Physically.”

“What happened?”

I told her plain, with no commentary.

I’d decided that on the drive to work the day before. If I ever called Darla about Rory, I’d tell her plain. Just the facts. No adjectives. No opinions. No you should’ve seen her face. Darla was Rory’s mother. Whatever I said about him, she’d feel it twice.

So I told her. Rory called Sadie at supper. He said he couldn’t swing a dress this year. Welding was slow. Sadie said it was fine. Twice.

At nine-forty, Tasha posted a picture of Madison in a six-hundred-dollar gown from Boutique 605.

Rory commented under it. Beautiful girl. So proud.

Sadie saw it.

That was all I said.

She was quiet a long time.

So long I thought maybe the call had dropped. I looked at my phone. Still connected. Forty-one seconds.

I could hear her breathing. I could hear her kitchen clock ticking. I could hear a dog barking somewhere outside her house in Howard.

Then she spoke.

“Is she crying?”

“Not where I can hear,” I said.

Darla let out a long breath.

“That’s worse,” she said. “You know that’s worse.”

“I know.”

“Rory did that too,” she said quietly. “When Gene left. He never cried where I could hear. He’d go up to his room and close the door real quiet. I’d stand outside it and listen and he wouldn’t make a sound.”

She was quiet again.

“Saturday,” Darla said. “I’ll pick her up at eight.”

“Darla, you don’t have to…”

“Saturday,” she said again. “Eight o’clock. Tell her to wear comfortable shoes. We’re going to Sioux Falls.”

“I can’t let you pay for…”

“Jodi,” Darla said. “You come too.”

I opened my mouth to argue. Then I closed it.

“Okay,” I said.

“And Jodi?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell her where we’re going,” Darla said. “Just tell her Grandma wants to take her to lunch.”

Chapter Five: Saturday

She drove the forty minutes to Sioux Falls herself.

She pulled into our driveway in Salem at seven-fifty-five. Five minutes early. Her old Buick LeSabre, maroon, with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and a dent in the back bumper from a deer on Highway 81 in 2019.

She honked twice. Like she always does.

Sadie looked out the front window. “Grandma’s here? It’s eight in the morning.”

“She wants to take you to lunch,” I said.

“At eight in the morning?”

“It’s a long lunch.”

 

Click here to continue reading PART 3: My Daughter’s Father Said He Couldn’t Afford Her Prom Dress, but That Same Night He Bought His Stepdaughter a $600 Gown