CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Saturdays started on the seventh of February.
We worked it out between us in about nine minutes on the phone and, until I filed, there was no piece of paper anywhere in the world that said any of it.
Noon to four. He comes to the lot, he does not come in the building, they come out to him. He brings them back to the same spot. No overnights.
That was the entire placement arrangement in this family and neither of us has ever once missed it, and when a lawyer finally asked me in March whether I wanted parenting time addressed in the filing I said I wanted the same schedule written down, no more and no less, and she looked at me over her glasses for a second and then wrote something down.
I want to be clear that I did not do that for him.
I did it because a court date is a thing that goes on a calendar and gets moved and gets continued and produces a document that a ten-year-old can find, and because there was nothing to fight about.
He was not going to ask for more. I was not going to give less.
The court could put the arrangement into an order; it did not need to invent a different family.
Where do you take two kids for four hours when you live in a rented room?
The library, mostly. There is a good one on the south side with a whole lower level for kids and a fish tank.
McDonald’s, four or five times, the one with the play structure, which Danny is a year too big for and used anyway.
The county museum on the free Sunday, except it was a Sunday so they swapped that week.
Bowling once, in February, which was a mistake he did not repeat, because the place is loud and the lanes reset with a bang and Danny asked to go sit in the truck after two frames.
The mall in February, twice, just walking around it. He bought them a pretzel and they walked around a mall for two hours.
That is the circuit. That is what it looks like when a man has nowhere to take his own children.
I never once said anything about it and I never once suggested he use the shared kitchen or the lot or the picnic table by the fence, and I could have, and I have thought about why I didn’t, and I do not have an answer I like.
The first Saturday he brought them back at four on the minute.
I was standing at the front of the lot by the fence because I had come out at five of, which I have done every single Saturday since.
Ivy got out first. She had her coat over her arm.
“Thank you, Dad.”
“Sure, bug.”
“It was fine. Thank you.”
She came past me and went inside.
That is what she gives him. That, or something very close to it, every single week.
Full sentence, correct volume, eye contact, and then she is gone.
I have watched that man take it in the chest fifty-two times now and he has never once said anything about it, and he has never once earned anything better.
Danny got out on the other side and came around the back of the truck.
Then he stopped at the open passenger door.
“Dad.”
“Yeah, bud.”
“Can I see your phone.”
Mike leaned across the seat and handed it out the door without asking why.
He did not know. I need that in here, because of what happened next. Nobody had told him. Gus knew about the door and had told him about the door, and nobody had told him about the phone, and I certainly had not.
Danny took it in both hands.
He turned the screen toward himself, the way he does, and he looked at the top right corner of it, and he said, in a completely normal voice:
“Sixty-two.”
And handed it back through the door.
Then he said, “Bye, Dad,” and walked past me toward the building.
I was standing about six feet away.
I watched my husband sit in the driver’s seat of a truck with a phone in his hand and work out what had just happened to him.
It took about three seconds. He is not stupid. He has never once been stupid, and that is most of the trouble with him.
He looked at the phone. He looked at the corner of it where the number is. He looked up through the windshield at his son going through a door in a converted motel.
Then he put both hands on the wheel and sat there.
I went inside.
The next Saturday it was a hundred.
The one after that it was a hundred. Then a hundred. Then a hundred.
Four weeks in a row, at four o’clock in the afternoon, after four hours of driving around with two children and a phone in a cupholder, my husband’s battery was at one hundred percent.
I counted. Obviously I counted.
On the seventh of March I said something to him about it at the curb after they went in.
“It’s always a hundred.”
He had his hands on the wheel. He does that now, at the curb, both hands, like he is waiting for a light.
“Yeah.”
“How.”
“I plug it in at six in the morning,” he said. “I don’t touch it. I unplug it at eleven fifty and I put it in the cupholder and I don’t open anything all day. It stays on the charger overnight before, too.”
“You don’t use it for four hours.”
“I don’t use it for six,” he said. “I leave at eleven fifty. It’s a hundred when I get here and it’s a hundred when I bring them back.”
I stood on the curb with my arms folded.
“You know it doesn’t help,” I said.
He looked out the windshield.
“Say that again.”
“You could hand him a hundred percent every Saturday for ten years,” I said. “It doesn’t do anything. He’s still going to ask.”
There was a long pause.
“I know,” he said.
And that is the sentence.
That is the whole of it, and I have never been able to decide whether I was glad when it came out of him or whether it made me feel sick, and I think it was both at once and I think it stayed both.
Because there is no version of this where it stops.
He is going to do that for the rest of his life.
He is going to plug a phone in at six in the morning on a Saturday for the next eleven years and hand it out a truck door to a boy who will get taller and then get a beard and will still, at some point in the afternoon, turn it around and read a number off the corner of it out loud.
And it is not going to fix one thing.
No board did that to him. Bell did not do that to him and Wes did not do that to him and I did not do that to him.
A seven-year-old did it, without meaning to, without knowing he was doing it, at nine o’clock at night in a hospital room in November.
He asked for a phone and read a number and gave it back.
I stood on that curb on the seventh of March and looked at a man with both hands on a steering wheel, and I did not feel one thing that I could have taken to anybody and called justice.
I went inside.
Denise was at the desk with her coat already on because it was past four.
“Oh, hon, hang on.” She reached under the counter. “A guy left this for you this morning. Big guy. He wouldn’t wait.”
It was not an envelope.
It was three sheets of paper, folded in half, with a paperclip on them.