He moved to Mitchell. He married Tasha two years after that. She had a daughter, Madison, the same age as Sadie. Six months younger.

He got Sadie every other weekend. He paid child support. Six hundred and twelve dollars a month, through the state. The Department of Social Services takes it right out of his paycheck.

He’s never missed a payment. I’ll give him that. Eleven years. Not one.

But he missed everything else.

He missed her first piano recital. He missed most of her volleyball games. He missed her eighth-grade graduation because Madison had a dance competition in Sioux Falls the same day.

He calls on her birthday. Most years. He sends a card with a twenty in it.

He takes her every other weekend. Usually. When he’s not working. When Madison doesn’t have something.

He loves her. I believe that. I’ve always believed that.

He just loves her from a distance. Like she’s a picture on a wall that he walks past every day and doesn’t really see.

He was Sadie’s father, not mine to fix.

That’s what I told myself, lying there at two in the morning. That’s what my counselor told me, five years ago, when I was still crying about it every week.

You can’t make him be the father she needs, Jodi. You can only be the mother she needs.

And I couldn’t make him pay.

The child support was what the court ordered. Six hundred and twelve dollars a month. A prom dress isn’t in the court order. Neither is showing up.

But I knew who loved her.

I knew one person who’d never once missed anything. Not one birthday. Not one concert. Not one volleyball game. Not one Christmas.

At six in the morning, while Sadie was in the shower, I picked up my phone.

I called his mother instead.

Chapter Four: Darla

Darla Lindstrom is seventy-two.

She did hair in Howard for forty-one years. Darla’s Beauty Nook, in a little brick building on Main Street next to the bank. Two chairs, two dryers, a radio that only played KJAM out of Madison, and a coffee pot that was always on.

She retired three years ago. She sold the shop to a girl she trained. But she still does the hair of eleven women from the Lutheran church every Friday morning in her own kitchen, because they won’t let anybody else touch it.

She raised Rory by herself.

His father, Gene Lindstrom, left when Rory was seven. Drove to Rapid City one Friday for a job interview and never came back. Darla found out three months later that he had another family out there.

She raised Rory on what she made doing hair. Never took a dime from Gene, because Gene never sent one. She made Rory’s lunches and went to his Little League games and sat in the bleachers at his wrestling meets.

She bought him a suit for his own prom. I know because she told me once. At Christmas, a few years after the divorce. She said she did six extra perms that month to pay for it.

She has never once missed Sadie’s birthday, not even the year of the ice storm.

That was 2016. Sadie was eight. Her birthday’s in January. A storm came through eastern South Dakota the night before and coated everything in two inches of ice. Power lines down from Sioux Falls to Huron. They closed Interstate 90.

Darla drove anyway. From Howard to Salem. Twenty-two miles of county roads, in her old Buick, at fifteen miles an hour, with a birthday cake on the passenger seat.

It took her an hour and forty minutes. She got there at seven at night. The cake was perfect. Chocolate, with pink frosting and eight candles.

Rory called the next day. He said the roads were too bad to get out of Mitchell.

She answered on the second ring. She’s always up at five-thirty. She’s been getting up at five-thirty her whole life.

“Jodi?” she said. “Is everything all right? Is Sadie okay?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “Physically.”

“What happened?”

I told her plain, with no commentary.

I’d decided that on the drive to work the day before. If I ever called Darla about Rory, I’d tell her plain. Just the facts. No adjectives. No opinions. No you should’ve seen her face. Darla was Rory’s mother. Whatever I said about him, she’d feel it twice.

So I told her. Rory called Sadie at supper. He said he couldn’t swing a dress this year. Welding was slow. Sadie said it was fine. Twice.

At nine-forty, Tasha posted a picture of Madison in a six-hundred-dollar gown from Boutique 605.

Rory commented under it. Beautiful girl. So proud.

Sadie saw it.

That was all I said.

She was quiet a long time.

So long I thought maybe the call had dropped. I looked at my phone. Still connected. Forty-one seconds.

I could hear her breathing. I could hear her kitchen clock ticking. I could hear a dog barking somewhere outside her house in Howard.

Then she spoke.

“Is she crying?”