Chapter Twenty
“Say that again,” I said.
“You’re going to lose Tuesday.” Roz picked her pen back up. “Not the case. Tuesday. And I need you to understand the difference before you walk in there, because if you don’t, you’re going to sit in my car afterward and fall apart on a day when nothing bad actually happened.”
“He’s asking to take them.”
“He’s asking. He’s not getting.”
She held up one finger.
“A magistrate at a temporary hearing is not deciding who’s a good mother.
He’s deciding how to keep everything upright for six months while the real work gets done.
And the single thing a court hates more than anything on this earth is moving children.
Two kids with a foster history, in school, no absences, in a home a guardian ad litem has already walked through?
Kearns is not pulling them out of that on a Tuesday morning in November.
Calloway knows it. He filed it anyway because that’s the job. ”
“Then what do I lose?”
“You lose the part where they stay away from him.”
She said it flatly and let it sit.
“He’s a legal parent with no findings against him.
He’s going to walk out of there with a parenting time order, and it is going to have a schedule on it, and you are going to hand your children over on a Saturday morning because a piece of paper says so.
That’s Tuesday. Start getting ready for it now, not in the hallway afterward. ”
“Why not play the recording.”
“Because it’s a forty-minute hearing on affidavits and there’s no testimony and no cross, and I would be handing Preston Calloway ten weeks to build a story about it before anybody who matters ever hears it.” She wrote something. “You don’t fire the good gun into the air.”
The Larkin County courthouse is a limestone box from 1931 with a metal detector in the vestibule and a woman named Dee who tells everybody to take their belt off.
Domestic Relations is on two. There’s a bench in that hallway that is the most miserable piece of furniture in the county, and I have since spent a great deal of time on it.
I wore the gray dress I got married in a courthouse in, which is a coincidence I did not notice until I was already sitting down, and the shoes I used to wear to IEP meetings.
That morning I had gotten both of them to school at eight fifteen and neither one of them had asked me anything, which meant both of them knew.
Jonah had put his hand flat on the passenger door before he got out, which he does, and said, “Text me at lunch.”
“You don’t have a phone.”
“Text Mrs. Kerrigan in the office,” he said. “She’ll tell me.”
I have thought about that a lot. My son had worked out a communications protocol.
Roz came up the stairs at nine twenty with a red folder under her arm and a coffee from the gas station, and that was the entire opposing force on my side of the room.
Calloway had four.
Him, a younger man, a woman with a laptop, and a paralegal who wheeled in a crate.
Wade came in at nine thirty in the charcoal suit and sat down and did not look at me one time, and I want to record that he was good at it, that it did not look like avoidance, that it looked like a man giving his full attention to the front of a room.
Courtrooms are smaller than they are on television and much more boring. There’s a seal, a flag, a court reporter, and a magistrate in a black robe who has done nine of these already this week.
Magistrate Kearns is about sixty and reads while people talk, which is unnerving until you understand he’s reading the thing you’re talking about.
Preston Calloway stood up and spoke for eleven minutes without a note.
He was extremely good, and almost none of it was about me.
He talked about stability. He said the word eight or nine times.
He talked about a home the children had lived in for three years with their own rooms, and he had photographs of those rooms and he handed them up.
He talked about a two-bedroom rental over a garage in a neighborhood he named, and then he did not say anything else about the neighborhood, because he didn’t have to.
He said removed from the home in the middle of the night twice.
He said no verified income and an offer letter is not employment and a license that has been lapsed since March of last year.
He never once called me a bad mother. He never said a single unkind thing about me. He built a very calm, very reasonable picture of a woman in trouble, and the picture was made almost entirely out of true facts.
And then he got to provision.
“Captain Kessler has continued to carry the children on his employer health plan without interruption,” he said, “and intends to.”
Roz didn’t look up from her legal pad.
“Both children?” she said.
“Both children.”
“And Mrs. Kessler?”
There was a beat of about a second and a half.
“Mrs. Kessler was removed from the plan during open enrollment,” Calloway said. “October thirtieth. Effective January first, per the plan’s terms.”
I sat completely still, which is the only thing I did that whole morning that I’m proud of.
Roz had told me on Friday: You will sit still. You will not shake your head, you will not look at him, you will not lean over and whisper to me. Kearns is sixty years old and he has heard every argument on earth. What he watches is the parties.
So I sat there and found out, in a courtroom, in front of a court reporter and four attorneys and a woman with a laptop, that on the thirtieth of October my husband had sat down at a computer at work and taken his wife off the insurance.
Eight days after I walked out of that house.
He had done it during the same week he filed the affidavit that said I was in a mental health crisis and could not provide for the children. He filed a document saying I couldn’t provide, and then he made it more true.
I do not believe he sat there and thought it through in those terms. That’s not how he works. He was doing paperwork and one of the boxes on the screen was me and he unchecked it.
I did the arithmetic without moving my face.
January first. Forty-eight days.
Roz stood up for six minutes.
She did not raise her voice and she did not tell any part of my story. She had told me on Friday that she wouldn’t and I hadn’t understood why until I watched her do it.
She said there was no order in existence, so nothing had been violated by anybody.
She said I had been the children’s primary caregiver every day for three years and that the father’s own filing did not dispute it.
She said the word lease and handed up a copy with my name on the tenant line.
She said the words offer letter and reinstatement application filed October twenty-ninth and fourteen of twenty continuing education hours completed, and she handed those up too.
She said the school attendance record showed one late arrival, on the morning of the twenty-third of October, and not one absence since, and she handed that up, and Kearns actually looked at that one for longer than the others.
And she said that the guardian ad litem had been in that apartment for fifty-five minutes on November sixth and had not filed anything asking the court to move anybody.
Then she sat down.
Kearns took about ninety seconds.
He denied the transfer. He said the children would remain in the residence they are currently in, that this was a temporary order and not a finding about anybody, and that he was not going to move two children in the middle of a school semester on this record.
Then he ordered temporary parenting time for the father. Alternate weekends, Friday six p.m. to Sunday six p.m., plus Wednesday evenings four to eight.
Then he ordered a full custody evaluation, Dr. Nadine Pruitt, both parents and both children, report to the court and to the guardian ad litem, and he set a review.
He said, “Anything else?” and Calloway said no and Roz said no, and it was eleven minutes past ten in the morning.
In the hallway Roz set the red folder on the miserable bench and put both hands on her hips.
“That went well.”
“He gets them every other weekend.”
“He gets them every other weekend, and you keep them, and there’s an evaluation, and the evaluation is the whole case.
” She looked at me over the glasses. “Mrs. Kessler, listen to me. This morning that man spent eleven minutes of Preston Calloway’s time at six hundred an hour and got a parenting-time schedule.
That’s what he bought. A schedule that every parent on earth gets automatically. ”
“He took me off the insurance.”
“Yes he did. And he did it in writing on a date, and I’m going to use it, and it is not the emergency it feels like right now. Medicaid, the marketplace, and I’ll be filing for temporary support this week which is going to include a line about medical.”
“Roz.”
“What.”
“Which Saturday.”
She flipped the sheet over.
“Kearns set it to start immediately.”
“Which Saturday.”
“This one,” she said. “Friday at six. Three days.”