My name is Raylene Combs. I am thirty-six years old. I have lived in Kankakee my whole life, two blocks off Fifth Avenue in a rented duplex with a chain-link fence and a maple tree that drops helicopter seeds all over the yard every spring, and I work the overnight shift as a certified nursing assistant at Meadowbrook Manor, a nursing home out past the river on the Bourbonnais line. I married Garrett Combs when I was twenty-three, in a church basement reception because we couldn’t afford the fellowship hall upstairs, and for eight years I believed we were building something ordinary and good. We had Cody first, then Bree three years later, and for a while it was the kind of life you don’t notice you’re grateful for until it’s gone.
It started coming apart the year Bree turned two. Garrett had taken a job at the truck dealership out on Route 17, selling used pickups to farmers and contractors, and that was where he met Shauna, who worked the front desk answering phones and filing paperwork and, it turned out, doing considerably more than that with my husband on his lunch breaks. I found out the way a lot of women find out, from a friend of a friend who felt obligated to tell me before I heard it somewhere worse. Garrett didn’t deny it. He didn’t even really apologize. He said he’d been unhappy for a long time and hadn’t known how to say it, and within four months of the divorce being final, he had moved Shauna into an apartment on the east side of town and, not long after that, married her.
I got the duplex, primary custody of Cody and Bree, and four hundred dollars a month in child support that arrived on time maybe half the year and showed up late or short the other half, depending on how Garrett’s commission checks were running. I am not going to sit here and tell you Garrett is a monster. He calls the kids most weeks. He shows up for most of his visitation weekends. He is, in his own limited, checked-out way, a father who loves his children. What Garrett is not, and has never once managed to be in six years, is a man willing to correct his wife when she says something cruel about me in front of other people, and that failure has cost me more than the missed child support ever did.
Shauna started talking about a year after the wedding. I don’t think it began as anything organized. I think it began the way most cruelty in a small town begins, with one offhand comment at a church potluck or a Friday night football game that felt good to say and got repeated because it was interesting, and then it became a habit, and then it became a reputation she had built for me without my permission. The comment I heard about most often, secondhand, from other mothers who felt bad enough to warn me, was some version of this: “I just feel so sorry for those kids. Somebody has to actually take care of them.” Said with a sigh. Said with a little shake of the head. Said, always, in a way that let everyone standing there fill in exactly who Shauna meant by “somebody,” and exactly who she meant by the mother who wasn’t doing it.
I want to explain what my life actually looked like during the years Shauna was building that reputation for me, because there is a wide, wide gap between what she was telling people and what was actually happening in my house on Fifth Avenue.
I work eleven-to-seven at Meadowbrook Manor five nights a week, which means I am asleep most mornings when the kids leave for school and I am usually just waking up, groggy and slow, when they get home in the afternoon. My mother-in-law from my own first marriage, a woman named Denise Pruitt who lived two doors down and who I still call my kids’ honorary grandmother even though she has no blood claim on either of them, has watched Cody and Bree in the after-school gap for six years now, in exchange for me doing her grocery runs and driving her to her cardiology appointments in Bradley. I detassel corn for three weeks every July for a seed company that pays cash under a Kankakee County contract, walking rows before sunrise until my arms are scratched raw to the elbow, because it is the single highest-paying thing a woman with my schedule can do in the summer. I clean the sanctuary and the fellowship hall at First Baptist on Saturday mornings for sixty dollars a week, money the church doesn’t advertise it pays because most of the women who’ve done that job before me did it for free out of faith, and I am not too proud to take money for scrubbing toilets when it means new shoes for my son.
And every August, no matter what else has gone wrong that year, I put a little into a mason jar that sits on top of my refrigerator with a strip of masking tape across the front that says AUGUST in permanent marker. I have kept that jar since the first back-to-school season after the divorce, when Cody needed shoes and I had nineteen dollars to my name after rent, and I stood in my kitchen and cried for exactly as long as I let myself cry about anything, which is never very long, and then I picked up a pen and started figuring out how to make nineteen dollars turn into what my son actually needed. That August I sold a set of my late grandmother’s china, six place settings with a gold rim that I had been keeping wrapped in dish towels in a box in the closet, to an antique dealer over in Watseka for two hundred and ten dollars, and I have never once regretted it, because Cody needed shoes and my grandmother, who raised four kids on a tenant farmer’s wages, would have sold that china herself without blinking.
Every August since, the jar gets filled a different way. One year it was extra shifts. One year it was selling a dresser I’d refinished on a weekend when I should have been sleeping. This past year, the year I’m telling you about, it was the detasseling money plus sixty dollars a week from the church plus every dollar of overtime Meadowbrook would give me, because Cody had shot up four inches since spring and needed almost an entirely new wardrobe, and Bree, who is particular in the specific, unshakeable way eight-year-olds get about things, had decided she needed a very particular style of dress for the first day of third grade, the kind with a collar and a sash, that ran thirty-four dollars even on the clearance rack.
I have never once, in seven years, let either of my kids start a school year without new clothes, new shoes, and full backpacks. Not because I need credit for it. Because it is the one thing, in a life that got upended by a man who traded me in for someone at the front desk of a truck dealership, that I still had complete control over, and I was not going to let anyone, especially Shauna, take that away from me too.
The year the alternator went out on my car was the hardest test of that rule I’ve faced so far. It happened in early July, right in the middle of detasseling season, and the mechanic on Fifth Avenue quoted me three hundred and ten dollars for the part and the labor, money I did not have sitting anywhere. I made a choice that month that I still stand behind, even though I know some people would call it foolish. I drove that car grinding and shuddering for six more weeks, parking it a block from Meadowbrook so the night supervisor wouldn’t hear it limping into the lot, because fixing it would have meant emptying the AUGUST jar down to nothing with five weeks still to go before school started. I finally got it repaired in late September, out of my first paycheck after the kids were already settled into their classrooms in new shoes, and I have never regretted the order I put those two things in, even on the mornings that car wouldn’t start at all and I had to call Denise to run me to work.
Cody remembers that summer, I found out later, though I never told him why the car sounded the way it did. He mentioned it once, offhand, the following spring, saying he’d figured out that whatever was wrong with the car had something to do with him and Bree getting new stuff for school, and that he’d decided, on his own, at ten years old, not to ask for anything else that year. That is the part of this whole story that still catches in my throat more than anything Shauna ever said about me. My son noticed. He noticed, and he never once complained, and he has never once, in six years, said a single unkind word about what our family has instead of what his father’s new family has.
Which is what makes what happened next so hard to sit with, even now.
The August that Bree was in kindergarten, Garrett had the kids for his usual two weeks in July, and Shauna took them shopping, on her own initiative, without asking me, and bought them each an outfit for the first day of school. It was a kind thing to do, on its face, and if she had left it there, I would have thanked her for it and moved on with my life. She did not leave it there. She posted photographs of Cody and Bree in the new clothes on her Facebook page with a caption that read, “So happy we could make sure these two started the year off right, some kids don’t have anyone looking out for that.” Forty-one people liked it. Six of them were mothers from the elementary school PTA. I did not comment. I did not call her. I took a screenshot, closed the app, and went back to folding the load of laundry I’d been doing when I opened it, because I had learned by then that anything I said in response would only give her more material.
What Shauna did not know, because she never once asked, was that the outfits sitting in Bree’s dresser that August, purchased three weeks earlier with money from the AUGUST jar, were already there, tags cut off, washed and folded, waiting for the first day of school. My daughter went to school that August in an outfit her stepmother bought and posted about, on top of an outfit her own mother had already provided, and nobody in that PTA Facebook comment thread had any way of knowing that. They only knew what Shauna told them, in the caption, in the sigh at the football game, in the comment at the potluck. And what Shauna told them, over and over, in a dozen small ways across six years, was that I was a mother who couldn’t be counted on to take care of the basics, and that it was lucky, so lucky, that Garrett had found a woman who could.
I want to tell you about the coat, because the coat is the part of this story that still makes my chest go tight when I think about it.
The winter Bree was seven, my father, who died the year before Cody was born and who I barely remember except through photographs and the things my mother told me about him, had left behind, among a handful of things I inherited from my mother’s estate, an old wool car coat, mustard-colored, with wooden toggle buttons, that my mother had kept in a cedar chest for thirty years because it was the coat he was wearing in her favorite photograph of him. Bree found it in my closet on a rainy Saturday, tried it on, and refused to take it off. It hung past her knees. The sleeves had to be rolled twice. She wore it around the house for a month, and when the weather turned that November, she insisted on wearing it to school over her regular coat, which I had, in fact, bought her new that August from the AUGUST jar, a purple puffer coat that fit her perfectly and that she had loved for exactly six weeks before her grandfather’s old car coat took its place in her heart.
I let her wear it. I want to be honest that some small, tired part of me almost didn’t, because I could already hear what people would say about a kid showing up to school in a men’s coat three sizes too big, sleeves rolled, missing a button. But Bree stood in my kitchen with tears in her eyes and told me it made her feel like she knew her grandpa, and I am not the kind of mother who takes that away from an eight-year-old over what the neighbors might think. So she wore it. And someone, I still don’t know exactly who, though I have my suspicions, mentioned it to Shauna, who mentioned it, apparently with real concern in her voice, to a woman on the PTA whose sister happened to work in the school office.
Three days later, I got a call from the school asking me to come in and speak with the assistant principal, a careful, tired-sounding man named Mr. Ackerman, about “a concern that had been raised” regarding my children’s clothing and general care.
I have never been so frightened in my adult life as I was walking into that meeting. I sat in a plastic chair across a desk from a man who would not quite tell me who had raised the concern, only that it had come through “a parent,” and I understood, with a cold, sick clarity, that somewhere in the machinery of that school, a rumor Shauna had been spreading for years had finally found a lever it could pull, a lever with the power to bring a caseworker into my home, to put my children through an investigation, to threaten the one thing I had built with my own two hands out of nothing since the divorce. I sat in that chair and explained, as calmly as I could manage with my hands shaking in my lap, about the coat, about my father, about the purple puffer coat hanging in the hall closet that Bree simply preferred not to wear that particular week. I explained about the AUGUST jar, though I did not use those words, I just told him that both my children start every school year with new clothes and shoes that I purchase myself, every single year, without fail. I did not mention Shauna’s name. I did not need to. I think Mr. Ackerman, who had two kids of his own in that same district and who had almost certainly heard some version of the Kankakee gossip mill’s take on my divorce, understood more than he let on.
The concern, as it turned out, went nowhere, because there was nothing to it. No caseworker ever came to my door. Mr. Ackerman closed the file, told me kindly that these things sometimes get overblown, and sent me home. But here is the part that I have never fully gotten over, in the two years since. The fact that the concern went nowhere never made it back to the parents who’d heard the whisper in the first place. Investigations that clear a parent don’t get announced at the football game. Rumors that started them do. I walked around Kankakee for the rest of that school year knowing that somewhere in a circle of mothers I saw at pickup and at church and at the county fair, there was a version of me living in their heads, a negligent mother who’d had a school investigation opened on her, and I had no way to reach into their heads and correct it without sounding exactly like the kind of defensive, guilty woman Shauna had already told them I was.
So I stopped trying to correct it. I stopped going to the PTA meetings I used to attend. I started dropping the kids off five minutes before the bell instead of walking them in, so I wouldn’t have to stand in that hallway making small talk with women I no longer trusted to give me the benefit of the doubt. I kept every receipt from every piece of clothing I ever bought my kids, filed in a shoebox in my closet, not because I thought I’d ever need to produce them again, but because some frightened part of me needed proof, even proof I’d never show anyone, that I was doing right by my children. I want to tell you that I rose above it, that I never once cried over what a woman I’d never even really had a conversation with was doing to my name in a town of thirty thousand people. That would not be true. I cried plenty. I just made sure I did it alone, at my kitchen table, after the kids were asleep, with the AUGUST jar sitting on the refrigerator behind me like a small, quiet witness to the truth nobody else in this story seemed interested in hearing.
This past August, the one that finally changed things, started out no different from any other. I put in my usual three weeks detasseling, came home every night that July with my arms striped in thin red scratches and my back aching in a way that took a hot bath and two ibuprofen to loosen, and I watched the AUGUST jar fill up dollar by dollar until it held enough, combined with what I’d saved from Meadowbrook overtime and church cleaning, for everything both kids needed. Cody, who is eleven now and has Garrett’s long legs and my stubborn chin, needed almost a full new wardrobe, having grown out of nearly everything from the spring. Bree needed the dress with the collar and the sash, thirty-four dollars on clearance, which I put on layaway in June and paid off in three installments so it wouldn’t hit my account all at once.
I bought both kids new shoes at the outlet store in Bourbonnais on a Tuesday night after my shift, running on maybe four hours of sleep, standing in the fluorescent aisle doing math in my head about whether I had enough left for backpacks too. I did. Barely. I drove home that night with the trunk full of bags and the AUGUST jar completely empty on my kitchen counter, and I felt what I feel every single year at that exact moment, which is not triumph, exactly, but something close to it. A quiet, private satisfaction that belongs to nobody but me, because nobody else ever sees the seven months of work that go into that one trunkful of bags.
Meet the Teacher night fell on a Thursday, the week before school started. Cody, who is old enough now to find these things mortifying, wanted to skip it entirely, but Bree had been counting down the days for a week, thrilled about her new dress and her new teacher, a soft-spoken woman named Mrs. Halvorsen who Bree had already decided, sight unseen, was going to be her favorite teacher of all time. I got off my shift at seven that morning, slept four hours, and dressed both kids in outfits from the AUGUST haul, Cody in a new polo and jeans that actually reached his ankles for once, Bree in the collared dress with the sash, her hair in the French braid she’d been begging me to learn to do since spring.
Garrett had the kids that particular week under the custody schedule, but Meet the Teacher night belonged to both of us, and Shauna came too, as she does to most of these things now, dressed sharp in a way that always makes me feel, walking in from a double shift, about as glamorous as a dish rag. I am not going to pretend I wasn’t dreading it. I stood in that elementary school hallway under the fluorescent lights, holding a folder of school supply lists, watching Shauna lean down to fix Cody’s collar with a proprietary little smile, and I braced myself the way I brace myself every time our two families end up in the same room.
It happened in front of Mrs. Halvorsen’s classroom door, where a small cluster of parents had gathered waiting for the room to open. Shauna was talking to another mother, a woman named Phyllis Winger whose daughter is in Bree’s grade, and I heard her say, in that same sighing, concerned voice she has perfected over six years, something about how relieved she was that “the kids finally look so put together this year,” with a glance in my direction that lasted just half a second too long to be accidental. Phyllis, to her credit, looked uncomfortable. I felt my face go hot, and I opened my mouth to say something, though I still don’t know what, because in eight years I had never once found the right thing to say to Shauna in public without sounding exactly as defensive as she needed me to look.
I didn’t have to say anything. Bree said it for me.
My daughter, who had been standing beside me holding my hand and swinging her new dress back and forth the way eight-year-olds do when they’re proud of what they’re wearing, looked up at Shauna with the plain, unguarded confusion of a kid who has just heard an adult say something that doesn’t match the facts as she understands them, and said, loud enough for the whole little cluster of parents to hear, “Put together how? Mom always buys us new clothes. She got this dress in June and put money on it every payday so it would be paid off by school. She picks corn every summer just so we can get shoes. Why would you say that?”
The hallway went quiet in the specific way a hallway goes quiet when eight adults simultaneously realize a child has said something true and unrehearsed and devastating, all at once, without any idea of the weight it carried. Bree wasn’t performing. She wasn’t trying to defend me or embarrass anyone. She was eight years old, and she was simply confused, because the story Shauna had just told did not match the story Bree had lived, and Bree, not yet old enough to understand that adults sometimes say things that aren’t true on purpose, corrected the record the only way she knew how, out loud, plainly, the way kids do.
Phyllis Winger looked at Shauna. Mrs. Halvorsen, who had opened her classroom door just in time to hear the whole thing, looked at me with an expression I will remember for the rest of my life, something between surprise and a kind of dawning, quiet respect. Shauna’s face went through three different colors in about two seconds, landing somewhere close to the shade of the hallway’s cinderblock walls, and she said something about not meaning it that way, that she just meant the kids looked nice, and reached for Cody’s shoulder in a way that made my son, who is eleven and sharper than any of us give him credit for, take a small, visible step to the side, closer to me.
I did not gloat. I want to be honest about that, because I have imagined, in weaker moments over six years, exactly this kind of scene, a public reckoning, Shauna exposed, me finally vindicated in front of witnesses, and I always imagined myself saying something sharp and satisfying in the moment. I did not say anything sharp. I put my hand on Bree’s shoulder, told her that was a very kind thing to notice about all the hard work Mommy does, and steered her gently through the classroom door before she could say anything else, because whatever this moment was doing for my reputation, it was still, first and always, my daughter’s Meet the Teacher night, and I was not going to let it become a stage for anything else.
But word travels fast in a school hallway, and faster still through a PTA phone tree, and by the following week, I understood, in the small ways word gets back to you in a town like Kankakee, that something had shifted. Phyllis Winger called me, the way people call when they want to apologize without quite admitting what they’re apologizing for, and asked if I wanted to help organize the fall book fair, something I had not been invited to do in three years. Mrs. Halvorsen mentioned, at drop-off one morning, how impressed she’d been listening to Bree talk about “the AUGUST jar,” which Bree had apparently explained to her entire class during a show-and-tell about family traditions, without any idea that the jar had ever been a secret or a wound. Denise Pruitt told me, over coffee on her porch, that she’d heard from her sister-in-law that the PTA mothers had started talking, quietly, about how Shauna maybe wasn’t quite as reliable a narrator as they’d assumed.
I never heard a word of apology from Shauna herself, and I don’t expect I ever will. What I did get, three weeks later, was a phone call from Garrett, which he does not make often, in which he told me, in his own halting, uncomfortable way, that Shauna had mentioned the hallway to him and that he wanted me to know he’d told her, for the first time in six years, that she needed to stop talking about how I raise our kids. I do not know exactly what that conversation between them looked like, and I have decided I don’t need to. What I know is that it happened, finally, because an eight-year-old in a thirty-four-dollar dress said something true in a hallway and nobody could argue with it, because it was true.
Cody asked me about it that night, after Bree had gone to sleep, sitting across from me at the kitchen table with a glass of milk he wasn’t really drinking. He wanted to know if I’d been upset about what Shauna said, and whether Bree was going to get in trouble for talking back to a grown-up, which is the kind of thing an eleven-year-old worries about even when he’s proud of his little sister for something. I told him Bree hadn’t talked back to anybody. I told him she’d just told the truth, plainly, the way she does about everything, and that a true thing said plainly doesn’t need defending, it just needs saying. Cody thought about that for a while, and then he asked if he could have the last of the milk in the carton, and that was the end of it, the way most of the biggest moments in a house with kids in it end, quietly, over something small, with everyone already moving on to whatever comes next.
I still keep the AUGUST jar on top of my refrigerator. I filled it again this spring, a little at a time, the way I do every year, and I will empty it again this coming August, on some night I won’t announce in advance, at the clearance racks off Route 50, doing math in my head under fluorescent lights the way I have done for seven years running. I don’t do it for credit anymore, and if I am honest with myself, I never really did it for credit in the first place. I did it because it was mine to do, the one part of my children’s lives that stayed entirely in my hands no matter what else got taken from me in that divorce, and I was not going to let anyone, not Garrett, not Shauna, not a hallway full of parents with half a story, decide that I hadn’t earned the right to call myself the mother who takes care of her kids.
This year, for the first time in seven Augusts, I put something in that jar for myself too, twenty dollars folded up in the bottom, under the masking tape that still says AUGUST. It isn’t much. It’s the first twenty dollars I’ve spent on myself in longer than I can remember that wasn’t left over after everything else was covered, and I bought myself a coat with it, at the same clearance rack, plain and warm and mine. I don’t know if Bree will ever fully understand what she did for me that night in the school hallway, correcting a story with nothing but the truth as she’d lived it. I hope she never has to understand the weight of it, honestly. I hope she just gets to keep being a kid who says true things out loud because they’re true, and grows up believing that’s simply how the world works. For her sake, and for the sake of every August I still have left in me to give her, I intend to spend the rest of my life making sure it stays that way.
This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
