PART 2
Day 26. Dad, Troy pushed my arm on the stove because the noodles burned. A man came and taped a paper on our door. Mom cried. Troy said the bank is taking our house and it’s your fault for not sending more money. Mom said I can’t tell you because then you will know where the money went. Please come home. I’m not ok.
I read it four times.
Then I sat down on the closet floor and cried for the first time since my father’s funeral.
He’d been writing to me every night. To a phone that couldn’t send anything.
Twenty-six nights of telling me the truth, while I was on the other end of a FaceTime call hearing “he’s fine, he’s asleep.”
I scrolled back through the drafts.
Day 9. Troy’s boys took my lizard. They said it ran away.
Day 14. I slept in the shed. It was dark. I counted to 1,000.
Day 19. Mom said if I tell you anything you will stop sending money and we will lose the house.
Day 22. I miss you. I put your hoodie on my pillow.
I took screenshots of every single one.
Then I found the paper from the door.
It was folded in Shannon’s purse on the kitchen counter. A notice of default from our mortgage company. Four months behind.
Four months. I had sent the mortgage money every single month.
Under it was a stack of casino markers from Coushatta. Thirty-one thousand dollars.
And a cashier’s check made out to Troy Gaines. Eight thousand dollars. Memo: “truck payment.”
My family’s house was being gambled away one girls’ night at a time. And the man sleeping in my recliner was being paid with my son’s mortgage.
I called the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office from the driveway.
Then I called my mother-in-law, Ruth, in Tulsa.
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.”
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. “Cole, man, come on.”
The deputy took one look at Eli’s arm. He gently peeled back the duct tape.
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.
“Who did this, son?”
Eli looked up at me.
I knelt down next to him.
“You can tell the truth now, buddy. I’m home. I’m not going anywhere.”
He pointed at Troy.
They arrested Troy in my living room in front of his own kids.
Shannon came downstairs in her robe and started screaming.
“You’re ruining my life! You’re never here! You don’t get to—”
The deputy held up her purse. The default notice and the casino markers sticking out the top.
“Ma’am, you’re going to want to stop talking and call a lawyer.”
Troy was charged with felony child abuse.
Shannon was charged with child neglect and failure to report. The court gave me emergency custody that afternoon. My lawyer and I caught up the mortgage in nine days. The house stayed ours.
Ruth drove down from Tulsa the next day. She brought Eli a new lizard in a shoebox with holes in the lid.
And she testified for me.
I quit the rig.
I took a job at a refinery twenty minutes from home. Day shift. Home by five.
The pay is less. My boy is worth more.
Eli’s arm healed with a scar shaped like a crescent moon. He says it looks cool. He tells people a shark bit him.
The first night we were alone in the house, he climbed into my bed with his new lizard and my old phone.
“Can I still write to you?” he asked.
“You don’t have to anymore, buddy. I’m right here.”
He thought about it.
“I want to,” he said. “So you never miss a day again.”
So now, every night before bed, Eli types a message on that old phone. I read them in the morning over cereal.
Last night’s said:
Day 61. Dad made pancakes. Lizard is named Rig. I’m ok. For real this time.
THE END.
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Kids will find a way to tell us the truth. Our job is to come home and listen. 💛
Do you think Shannon deserves a chance to see Eli again someday? Tell us in the replies.