CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The column started at minus twelve hundred and forty.
I drew it in the back of a school notebook that came out of a donation bag with the front cover burnt along one edge, which is a thing I did not notice until about the fourth time I opened it.
Minus twelve hundred and forty a month.
That is what it costs to be three people when you are the only one earning and your husband’s twenty-five percent is twenty-five percent of nothing.
I never asked the court for temporary support.
I want that in here because people find it strange.
Wisconsin starts with percentage guidelines—seventeen percent for one child and twenty-five percent for two before the adjustments—and twenty-five percent of a man scanning inspection files was a real number for six weeks and then his fire-department paycheck was zero.
By the time I filed in March, there was nothing coming from that paycheck to collect.
I did the arithmetic on it in about four minutes and did not ask a judge for an interim order.
So I got clients.
My boss handed me the first one in January, a small HVAC outfit he did not want, and said, in the doorway, without looking up, “Take it direct, don’t run it through here.” That is the entire conversation we have ever had about any of it.
The second one came from Jess’s husband’s shop.
The third was a woman two doors down from us at the Fenwick Residence named Marisol, who ran a three-person cleaning business out of a room with two beds in it and had fourteen months of receipts in a shoebox and no idea what she owed.
The fourth came from Marisol.
I worked from midnight to four. That is not a figure of speech and it is not something I recommend and it is not a triumph. I did payroll for other people’s employees on a laptop in a converted motel while my children slept and then I got up at seven and did my actual job.
Minus twelve hundred and forty.
Then in March, minus six hundred and ten.
Then on the ninth of May, at about one in the morning, I ran the total and it came out at minus a hundred and eighty.
I sat at that table and looked at it for a while and then I got up and made a cup of tea.
I do not like tea. I have never liked tea.
There was no wine and there was nothing to say to anybody and it was one in the morning, and I wanted to do something ceremonial, so I made a cup of tea out of a box that had been in that shared kitchen since before we got there and I drank about half of it standing at the window.
Minus a hundred and eighty dollars a month.
I have made more money since. I made more money in one week last November than that whole spring. I have never once been happier about a number.
Apartment hunting in that condition is its own education.
My rental applications had gotten harder by February.
Two medical bills were already in collections while I was on hold with the state trying to get the kids onto BadgerCare, and a woman at a management company on the west side explained to me very kindly that they used a scoring system and that she was not allowed to override it.
Four places said no on paper before anybody met me.
Then in June, Marisol’s cousin knew a woman.
That is how it actually works and nobody puts it in a brochure.
812 Delaney Street is the upper of a two-family. Second floor, two bedrooms, a kitchen six by nine, a chipped tub, and a back porch with a railing that has been painted so many times you cannot tell what it is made of.
Ten ninety-five a month plus utilities.
There is a mountain ash outside the kitchen window.
Mrs. Ferko is seventy-eight and has owned that building since nineteen eighty-one and lives in the lower with two cats. She looked at my paperwork for about ninety seconds and then put it down on the table and asked me what my son’s name was.
I do not know what she saw. I have thought about it and I do not know.
The divorce was final on the twenty-ninth of July.
It took six minutes.
It was a hearing room, not a courtroom, on the fourth floor, with a court commissioner and a clerk and nobody else in it except the two of us. I wore the navy blouse. He wore a tie.
She went through the written stipulation with us: the property division was already settled, legal custody and the Saturday placement schedule were written down exactly as we had been doing them, and the support calculation was in the paperwork because the court required one.
She asked each of us whether we understood and agreed. We both said yes.
Then she asked the question.
“Mrs. Halloran, is this marriage irretrievably broken?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Halloran, is this marriage irretrievably broken?”
He had his hands flat on the table in front of him.
“Yes,” he said.
That is the part I did not expect and had not braced for. I had spent four months getting ready to say it. I had not once thought about the fact that he was going to have to say it too, out loud, to a stranger, in a room with a clerk in it.
He said it and his voice did the thing it does.
She granted it. She said some things about the judgment being entered and about the certified copy, and it was six minutes, and we came out into the hallway and he said, “Are you parking on Kilbourn,” and I said yes, and he said, “It’s a dollar cheaper on State,” and we went down in the elevator together and did not say anything else.
I got the keys on the second of August.
Mrs. Ferko handed them over in the downstairs hall. Two keys on a ring with a plastic strawberry on it that had gone the color of an old bandaid.
“Just water the plants,” she said. “They’re old.”
The plants are two spider plants on the landing that are older than my daughter and have never been repotted, and I have watered them every Sunday for a year and they have doubled in size, and Mrs. Ferko has commented on it exactly once, which was to say, “Huh.”
The table came from an estate sale on the fifth for thirty dollars.
The chairs did not come with it.
Chair one is from the same sale, four dollars, wood, painted green underneath the paint that is on it now.
Chair two came off a curb on Becher Street on a Tuesday, and I put it in the back of the Corolla with the hatch open and drove home at fifteen miles an hour.
Chair three was Jess’s, out of her basement, and it swivels, which Danny considers the greatest engineering achievement of the modern age.
Chair four came from Marisol, who brought it up two flights on her own shoulder and would not let me help and would not stay for coffee.
Four chairs, none of them matching, around a thirty-dollar table in a six by nine kitchen with a mountain ash outside the window.
We ate at it for the first time on the sixth of August.
Nobody said anything about it. I did not make a speech and neither of my children looked around the room misty eyed, because they are eleven and eight and it was Thursday and there was pasta.
Ivy sat in the green one. Danny took the swivel and turned all the way around twice before I told him to stop.
Afterward I went and got the paper bag out of the box it had ridden over in.
Four rubber wedges, the heavy commercial kind, gray, with the ridges.
I did the bedroom door and the bathroom door and the door to the kids’ room.
The fourth one is the door between the kitchen and the hall, which does not need to be open.
There is no reason for that door to be open.
It does not close on its own, it has no closer on it, it will stand wherever you put it, and it has never once mattered to anybody in this family whether it is open or shut.
I wedged it open anyway.
It is open right now.
Somebody knocked on the downstairs door.