Chapter Thirty-Seven
The final entry is nine pages and I have read it maybe a dozen times and I still find it dull, which Roz says is the correct reaction and the whole point.
The Court finds that the Mother shall be designated the residential parent and legal custodian of the minor children, Jonah R. Kessler and Ruby A. Kessler.
That’s the sentence. That’s the one the entire eight months was about and it sits in the middle of page three between a paragraph about tax exemptions and a paragraph about who carries the dental.
There is parenting time for him in there, alternate weekends and a Wednesday, the same as it has been, and there is a paragraph saying either party may petition to modify.
There is a support order at sixteen twenty a month with income withholding already running.
There is a line saying neither parent shall discuss the litigation with the children.
And there is a paragraph on page seven that Roz fought for in March and that I did not fully understand until I read it in the entry.
The Court has reviewed the evaluations of Dr. Pruitt and Dr. Reiss and the transcript filed December 11 and finds the concerns raised therein regarding the Father’s conduct toward the minor children to be substantiated.
Substantiated.
Not alleged. Not asserted by the mother. Not resolved by agreement between the parties in a conference room in Akron with shortbread on a plate.
Found.
“That’s your wall,” Roz said. “In four years, if he wakes up one morning and hires somebody, whoever it is opens the docket and reads page seven, and then they call him and tell him what it’s going to cost to get around that paragraph, and I would guess about eighty percent of the time that’s where it ends. ”
“And the other twenty?”
“Then he pays it and we go again, and I’ll still be here, and you’ll have four years of pay stubs.” She capped a pen. “Go home, Mrs. Kessler.”
“Not anymore.”
“Right,” she said. “Ms. Shaw. Go home.”
Because that’s on page nine.
I asked for it in February and I did not tell anybody I’d asked, including Priya, including Bernie, because it felt like a thing that would be embarrassing to want out loud.
The Mother’s former name, Nora Elizabeth Shaw, is hereby restored.
Eleven years of a name I took at twenty-three in a courthouse in a gray dress. Restored in one line of nine-point type between a paragraph about a 401(k) and the signature block.
It took me until August to get the license and the registration and the bank and the insurance and the school records and the two email addresses and the badge at work. There is a lot of paperwork attached to a name and nobody tells you that either.
Bernie printed the new badge herself on the machine at the front desk and clipped it to my lanyard while I was standing there.
NORA SHAW, MS, CCC-SLP.
She looked at it for a second, and then she said, “Took you eleven years to fix a clerical error,” and went back to her office, and I stood by the fish tank for a minute.
Here is the summer.
In June, Jonah started forgetting his backpack.
I need people to understand what that is. Twice in three weeks, once at school and once at Priya’s, and both times he was mildly annoyed about it, and both times I stood in a doorway and had a private moment that I could not explain to anybody.
For three years that boy packed two bags on Sunday nights and put them by a wall with the straps out.
In June he left one in a hallway because he was talking to somebody about a video game.
In July he told me I was being annoying.
He said it under his breath about a haircut and then his whole face changed and he went very still for about two seconds, waiting to see what happened.
I said, “I probably am,” and kept driving.
He did that four more times before Labor Day and I have never once made a thing of it, and Anne Whitcomb told me in September that this is the part most parents get wrong, that they wait a year for the kid to come out of his shell and then when he does they punish him for the first thing that comes out of it.
He goes to Anne Whitcomb every other Thursday. Forty dollars. It’s the best money I have ever spent and there was a stretch in the winter when it was ten percent of everything I had.
He still checks the door when I come in a room. Anne says that one may not go away and that it does not need to.
He sleeps facing the wall now.
Under the blanket, in shorts, with one arm hanging off the top bunk, and I do not know exactly when that changed because there was no announcement, and I have decided that not knowing is the correct outcome.
Ruby started drawing houses with the windows open.
That is not me reading into it. She had been drawing houses since she came to me at three, and every single one of them, for three years, had windows that were a square with a cross through it and nothing else.
In July they started having yellow in them, spilling out onto the grass, and she explained it to me at the folding table without being asked.
“So it’s not scary,” she said. “You can see the house is okay from outside.”
The arrears came in March, one deposit, five thousand six hundred and forty dollars, and I sat in my car in the Hollis lot and looked at my phone for a while.
I paid Roz what I owed her. I paid Iva Prosser the rest of the deposit in one go and she was annoyed about it.
I bought a couch that nobody has to apologize for, and a bed frame, and two bicycles at the end of the season, and I put four thousand of it in the account at Larkin County Savings and did not touch it.
By September I was full time at thirty-four an hour, with a caseload of nineteen, and a waitlist.
Not a March waitlist. Not yet. But there were four families in October who called and asked for me by name, and Bernie put a note on my desk about it with no words on it, just the number 4 and a circle around it.
Dean Alvarez started being around in a way I did not notice for about two months, which I have since worked out was the entire design.
He is at the Hollis Center Mondays through Thursdays and I am there five days, and that is how it started, which is to say it did not start, it just failed to stop.
Coffee in the break room. Then coffee in the break room at the same time twice a week. Then a conversation in the parking lot in June that went forty minutes and that I did not notice was forty minutes until I got in the car.
He came to Jonah’s science fair in May because Priya told him about it and half the center came, and he stood in the back and left before I could get across the gym.
He never once offered me money. He never asked about the case, not one question, in eight months. He never said a word about Wade Kessler, and I know for a fact he knew the whole thing by February, because it is a small town and Bernie Halloran has a big mouth.
What he did was show up on a Saturday in August when Priya and I were trying to get a used dryer up an outside staircase, and take one end of it, and then leave.
I asked him once why he never asked me anything.
“You spend all day telling people things because they’ve got a clipboard,” he said. “Seemed like a bad thing to add to.”
Ruby asked in September, at dinner, with her mouth full, in the way seven-year-olds ask questions that have clearly been discussed elsewhere.
“Mom. Is Dean your boyfriend?”
I put my fork down.
“No,” I said. “Dean is somebody I work with who is a friend of ours.”
“Okay.” She went back to her plate. “Jonah said probably.”
Jonah did not look up and did not say anything and did not turn a single hair, and got up and cleared his plate and put it in the dishwasher upside down on the top rack the way I do.
Then, at the sink, with his back to me:
“He fixed the lock.”
“What lock.”
“The back door. The one you could open with a card.” He rinsed his hands. “He did it in June when you were at Priya’s. He brought the thing in his truck and put a different one in and took the old one with him.”
I stood in my kitchen.
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“No,” Jonah said. “He told me.”