PART 3: Four Months Behind
It was a notice of default from our mortgage company. Four months behind. Foreclosure proceedings would begin in thirty days unless the full balance was paid.
Four months. I had sent the mortgage money every single month. I had the transfers saved on my phone. I had worked night shifts in sideways rain so that this exact piece of paper would never exist.
Under it was a stack of casino markers from Coushatta, signed in Shannon’s handwriting. I added them up standing right there at the counter. Thirty-one thousand dollars.
And at the bottom, a receipt for a cashier’s check made out to Troy Gaines. Eight thousand dollars. Memo: "truck payment."
I looked out the front window at the lifted black pickup crushing Shannon’s flower bed. Then I looked at the man asleep in my recliner. My family’s house was being gambled away one girls’ night at a time. And the man sleeping in my chair was being paid with my son’s mortgage.
I tucked everything back into the purse exactly the way I’d found it. Then I walked out to the driveway and called the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office. My voice didn’t sound like mine. I told the dispatcher about the burn, the duct tape, the messages, the shed. She asked if the child was in immediate danger. I stared back at the house. "I’m not leaving him alone with them again," I said. "Not for one minute." She told me deputies would come first thing in the morning and to keep my son with me.
Then I called my mother-in-law, Ruth, in Tulsa. It was nearly five. She answered on the second ring, the way grandmothers do when the phone rings in the dark. When I told her, she cried on the phone. "She asked me for money twice this summer," she said. "She said you’d been laid off. Cole, I had no idea." "Neither did I," I told her.
I went back inside and sat on the floor outside Eli’s bedroom door until the sun came up. Every time the recliner creaked downstairs, my whole body went rigid. At seven, Eli woke up and shuffled out with his sleeves pushed up, and he crawled into my lap without saying a word. I made him toast. He ate four pieces. He kept glancing at the stairs like he expected someone to take the plate away.
Two deputies arrived at 9 a.m. Troy was asleep in my recliner again. He woke up with a flashlight in his face. "What is this?" he slurred, squinting, one hand raised. "Cole, man, come on."
The older deputy didn’t answer him. He crouched down in front of Eli, who stood beside me in the kitchen, and asked if he could see his arm. Eli nodded. The deputy took one look at the duct tape and gently, slowly, began to peel it back.
Eli flinched. I held his other hand. The tape came away with a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life.
Under it was a second-degree burn. Blistered. Infected at the edges. Shaped exactly like the edge of a pan.
The deputy’s jaw tightened. The younger deputy stepped between the recliner and the front door without being told. Brody and Mason sat frozen on the couch, a bag of chips forgotten in Mason’s lap.
"Who did this, son?" the deputy asked.
Eli looked up at me. Then his eyes flicked to the recliner. Troy was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees, staring straight at him. "Go on, little man," Troy said quietly. "Tell him how you bumped it. Tell him how clumsy you are." Eli’s lip began to tremble.
I knelt down beside him so we were eye to eye. "You can tell the truth now, buddy. I’m home. I’m not going anywhere."
Eli drew a long, shaky breath. Upstairs, our bedroom door creaked open, and Shannon’s footsteps hit the landing. Troy’s jaw clenched. And my son slowly raised his trembling hand.
