The parking lot behind St. Raphael’s Church on the west side of San Antonio is where I first laid eyes on Donovan Parker. He was carrying folding chairs back inside after a Tuesday night community supper, moving quickly, the way people do when they’re trying not to let anyone see how tired they are. Pastor Elias Moreno had called me two days earlier and said, simply, “There’s a family here you should meet.” He didn’t oversell it. He didn’t need to.
Donovan, 50, is a flight attendant with United Airlines — a job that sounds comfortable from the outside and is quietly punishing from the inside. He works three- and four-day rotations out of San Antonio International, comes home to a house where his wife is the full-time caregiver for their 11-year-old son, Marcus, who has a rare form of epilepsy requiring round-the-clock supervision. His wife cannot work. Her ex-husband, Marcus’s biological father, had not paid a cent of court-ordered child support since October 2024 — a figure that was supposed to be $620 a month.
When I sat down with Donovan Parker at a corner table in the church’s small kitchen, he had a cup of coffee he wasn’t drinking and a folder of papers he’d clearly gone through many times. He put both hands around the mug and looked at me like he was deciding how honest to be. Then he exhaled and started talking.
When the Car Died, the Whole System Cracked
The transmission on Donovan’s 2013 Honda Pilot failed on a Friday morning in January 2026 — the same week that a $620 child support payment didn’t arrive for the fourth consecutive month. The repair estimate came in at $3,200. His savings account, he told me, held $214 at the time.
“I didn’t tell my wife right away about the car,” Donovan said. “She already had enough to carry. I just started doing the math in my head on the bus ride home, and the math didn’t work no matter how I arranged it.”
Without a car, getting to the airport — and keeping the job that paid for everything — required a combination of rideshares and borrowed vehicles from his brother-in-law. That lasted three weeks before the arrangement became unsustainable. He was spending roughly $340 a month on Uber rides to and from shifts, money the family didn’t have a category for.
What made the situation particularly cruel was its invisibility. From the outside, Donovan Parker looked fine. He wore his uniform. He smiled at passengers. He brought home a paycheck. His household income hovered around $72,000 a year — solidly middle class on paper, stretched dangerously thin in practice, because medical equipment for Marcus, specialist co-pays, and the administrative costs of managing a child with serious health needs ate through the margins that should have been there.
The Tax Credit Conversation He Almost Didn’t Have
Pastor Moreno had mentioned to Donovan that he should look into what tax credits might be available to him. Donovan admitted he’d been filing his own taxes on TurboTax for years, quickly, because he didn’t think his situation was complicated enough to warrant a professional. He was wrong, though not in the way he expected.
“I always thought credits were for people who were really low income,” he told me. “I didn’t think someone making what I make would qualify for much of anything.”
As Donovan explained it, a volunteer tax preparer at a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) site — operated through United Way of San Antonio — sat with him for nearly two hours in February 2026. According to the IRS’s VITA program, these free tax preparation services are available to households earning roughly $67,000 or less, though some sites serve higher-income filers with complex situations.
What emerged from that session surprised Donovan considerably. The preparer identified two credits he had been leaving unclaimed: the Child Tax Credit, for which Marcus qualified, and — because Marcus’s medical expenses were extensively documented — an analysis of whether he might qualify for the Child and Dependent Care Credit given the costs associated with his son’s supervision needs.
The Child Tax Credit for tax year 2025 provided up to $2,000 per qualifying child, with up to $1,700 of that amount refundable through the Additional Child Tax Credit, according to IRS guidance on the Child Tax Credit. For Donovan’s income level, the full $2,000 was accessible — the phase-out doesn’t begin until $400,000 for married filing jointly households.
What the Numbers Actually Looked Like
The VITA preparer’s final numbers weren’t a windfall — Donovan was careful to say that, and I want to be careful to report it that way. This wasn’t a story of a hidden treasure discovered. It was closer to a pressure valve that kept things from completely blowing apart.
His 2025 federal return, once properly filed in late February 2026, produced a refund of approximately $3,100. That number included the $1,700 refundable portion of the Additional Child Tax Credit and adjustments to his withholding that had been miscalculated for at least two years. He also identified a state-level property tax exemption he hadn’t applied for — a separate process in Texas for families with disabled children — which would reduce his annual tax bill going forward.
The child support situation remained unresolved. Texas’s Attorney General’s Office had an enforcement case open against the ex-husband, but Donovan’s wife had been told enforcement could take many additional months. According to the Office of Child Support Services, Texas collected over $3.1 billion in child support in fiscal year 2023, but enforcement timelines vary widely by case complexity.
The Part That Still Hurts
When I asked Donovan what he wished he’d known sooner, he didn’t hesitate. He said he wished someone had told him that being in the middle — not poor enough to feel entitled to help, not wealthy enough to have a financial advisor — was the most dangerous place to be.
He was also dealing, quietly, with what he called the weight of performing stability. At work, he smiled. At church, he volunteered. At home, he tried to shield his wife from the full scale of what was coming at them. That facade, he told me, was its own kind of exhausting.
“Marcus doesn’t understand money,” he said. “He just knows when I’m home and when I’m not. And I want to be home more. But I can’t be.” He looked at the table for a moment. “That’s the part the refund doesn’t fix.”
The car was eventually repaired in early March 2026. He’s back to driving his own route to the airport. The child support case moved no faster. His wife continues to manage Marcus’s care full-time, and the household remains exactly one unexpected expense away from crisis. Donovan knows this and says so without bitterness — more as a statement of fact than a complaint.
When I left the church that evening, Pastor Moreno walked me to my car. He asked if the story would help people. I told him I hoped it would — not because Donovan’s outcome was dramatic, but because it was ordinary. Thousands of families are sitting on credits they don’t know exist, filing their own returns, assuming they’re not the kind of people who qualify for anything. Donovan Parker is exactly that kind of people. And he did.
Related: A Denver Nurse Counted on $4,100 in Child Tax Credits — Then the IRS Froze Her Refund for Nine Weeks
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