I said: “I’ll keep sending it, and I want you to go.” Not I’ll think about it. I told a woman to take my grandchildren four hundred miles away and I told her I’d fund it, and I said it before she’d finished asking, because I’d been waiting four years for someone to give those kids a reason to be somewhere else. That’s the sentence I can’t repeat in my own house. My husband thinks the money goes to a church fund. My son thinks his mother is on his side. And I sat at a table in a Cracker Barrel and told his ex-wife to leave the state and promised to pay for it.
The part that makes it worse is that I meant it as a rescue and I know it also functions as a purchase. Six hundred a month buys a woman the ability to make a decision she couldn’t otherwise make, and the decision I bought is the one I wanted. If I’d wanted her to stay, that money would have been leverage in the opposite direction, and she’d have felt it. She’s thirty-four and works nights and has no family here. She was never in a position to say no to me about anything, and I’ve been telling myself for four years that I was being generous, when what I was actually doing was buying standing.
They left in October. I have them for two weeks at Christmas and I’ve been told I can come down whenever, and I will, and it will cost me another line in a budget that was supposed to last until I’m ninety. My son found out in November — she told him, which she had every right to do — and he called me and used the word betrayed, and he isn’t wrong. He is also, and this is the thing no one in my family will say out loud, not a good father, and I have watched two small children learn that at close range for six years. I’d do it again. I still can’t say it to anyone with a face.
