The letter was written in the quick, round hand of my daughter, the hand that had decorated every troop badge chart in Wichita. Mom, if you are reading this at my funeral, then Travis already knows about the money, and he is going to try to use the girls to get it. Here is the truth. I have been saving the child support from their father, Dan, for six years, in an account I opened in secret. It is now sixty two thousand dollars. Travis found out in August. I think he tried to open my mail. I am afraid of him, Mom.
I put my hand to my chest. The deputy, Hank Lusk, was sitting at my kitchen table with his hat on his knee and a cup of coffee going cold. The girls sat on either side of me. Kenzie, who was eleven, read the second page over my shoulder with her lips moving. Paige was unpinning the last gold pin from the inside of the sash and arranging them in a neat row on the oilcloth. Shelby wrote, I took out a protective order in September. It is in the sash. Travis does not know the judge granted it.
The order had been issued on the fourth of September, effective for a year. It forbade Travis Mahon from contacting Shelby, going within five hundred feet of her, or living in her home. He had apparently never been served. The papers had been mailed, the deputy said, to a post office box that Shelby had rented under the name of her troop, which Travis never saw. Hank studied the stamp on the last page. He looked up and said, very evenly, “Mrs. Hendricks, this means that every minute he spent in that house since September has been a violation of a court order.”
A mother who prepares in the dark leaves her children not only a hiding place, but a map out of it.
Shelby had gone on to describe the last weeks of her life in a plain, clipped way, as a nurse might chart a patient. Travis had begun to take small amounts from her purse. He had read her email. He had told Kenzie that if her mother ever left, he would make sure the girls went with him. Shelby had hidden the debit card, which she called the Grandma card, and had asked Dan, in Fort Riley, to be ready to take the girls if anything happened. She wrote, Dan does not know the whole story, but he has promised. Please call him.
I called Dan Whitfield at eleven that night. He was a staff sergeant, the father of the girls, a man I had met four times and judged badly. He answered on the second ring in a voice thick with sleep, and when I told him about the funeral and the letter, he was silent. Then he said, “Mrs. Hendricks. I am getting in my truck. It is nine hours to Wichita. I will be there at breakfast. Do not let them out of your sight.” I could hear the keys jangle. I could hear his boots on the floor. He did not ask a single question.
He arrived at seven in the morning with his hat in his hand, unshaven, red eyed. Kenzie flew down the steps and into his arms, and Paige followed, and for a long time the three of them stood in my front yard in the cold, rocking, saying nothing. I watched from the door with Deputy Lusk. He had slept in his cruiser, in my driveway, all night. When I asked him why, he said, “Maam, I buried a daughter of my own. I know what a man like that can do when he gets desperate.”
Travis came on Saturday. He parked a block away and walked up my path with a lawyer in a cheap tie, smiling. The deputy met them at the gate with the protective order and a pair of handcuffs. Travis smile did not so much fade as fall off. The lawyer, who was perhaps twenty eight years old, read the order, read it again, and stepped back from his client with a look I can only describe as horror. Travis shouted. He swore that he was the only father those girls knew. The deputy read him his rights anyway.
The charges grew as the bank records came in. Travis had opened two credit cards in the name of Shelby after her death. He had tried to withdraw funds from the account of Dan, using the girls as a pretext. A detective found, in the trunk of his truck, a notebook with the Social Security numbers of both girls and a list of banks. The woman in the pink hoodie, it turned out, was his cousin, who had agreed to help him “claim” the money in Reno. Both were convicted of identity theft and conspiracy. He took six years, she took two.
Dan was granted full custody in January. He did not take the girls away from me. He rented the little house next door and brought his mother up from Arkansas to help. Every day the girls walk through my back gate for supper, and every Saturday we go to the park together, the whole odd family of us, and Dan pushes Paige on the swings until she shrieks. He told me, last week, that he would never again take the strength of a woman for granted. I said that his daughters would hold him to that.
On the anniversary of the funeral, Kenzie stood up at the troop ceremony in the place of her mother and read the Girl Scout promise, her voice clear in the crowded hall. Paige wore the sash. All forty two badges lay on it in perfect rows, and the little gold pins were back on the inside, in a neat line, where Shelby had put them. I sat in the third row, with Dan on one side of me and Deputy Lusk on the other, and I cried without shame, and nobody minded in the least.