7. Shane
Shane
Dale reads the number out in a conference room the way you’d read a delivery confirmation.
Probability of paternity, ninety-nine point nine nine percent.
Nobody says congratulations. A row of lawyers, a manager and a publicist sit around the table, and through the entire meeting not one of them uses the word daughter.
There’s a page in front of me with a table on it and a lot of numbers I don’t understand, and at the bottom, in a box, Alleged Father with my name typed beside it, and under that, Child. Broderick, Sadie R. I don’t know what the R is for.
“Right.” Mitch pulls the legal pad toward himself. “So it’s a different conversation now.”
“Yeah.”
“First thing, nothing goes out until we have a package. Second thing is the legal posture, and I want Dale on that today, because as of this morning she has physical custody of a child with a medical history and an income that goes up and down, and every day that sits is a day of precedent.”
“I want to say something.”
Everybody looks up.
“Say something where,” Mitch says.
“I don’t know. Anywhere. I want to, because what I said was, I mean I sat there and said.” I stop. My hands are doing something on the table and I put them in my lap. “It wasn’t true and I want to go say so.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it. That’s the whole thing I want to do.”
“And I hear you.” He caps the pen, which he does when he’s about to be gentle.
“Truly. But you go out tomorrow and say I knowingly lied on a broadcast, and every carriage clause we have gets a second read. The insurer calls. The truck people walk, and the truck people are nine million dollars, and that’s before we get to whether it helps you in a courtroom to have gone on record about your own dishonesty. ”
“There isn’t a courtroom.”
“There’s going to be a courtroom.”
“Why is there going to be a courtroom?”
“Because she has your daughter and a lawyer and forty thousand dollars from a website.” He lets that sit. “I’m not saying she’s wicked. I’m saying there’s a version of the next year where you see that child four days a month, and I’d rather we not walk into it holding hands and singing.”
Janelle says, “She didn’t sell it.”
“You know that how?”
“Because I’ve read every message that woman ever sent this office and not one of them asks for money.”
“Every message you were shown,” Mitch says.
Something goes past in that. It goes past fast, the way a wrong note goes past in a room with a bad monitor mix, and I hear it and don’t catch it, and I will think about that for a long time.
Dale leans in. “Practically speaking, we should file something protective. Not aggressive. It puts a marker down.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning if she does go to press, or she takes the baby somewhere, we’re not starting from nothing.”
“She’s not going to press.”
“You didn’t think she’d give a website four photographs of your kitchen,” Mitch says.
And I sit there with my hands in my lap. I said, “Do whatever you have to do.”
Dale said, was that an authorization, and I said yes, and Dale said he’d have something over this afternoon, and I said fine. Then I said the other part, the part that’s mine and nobody handed me.
“Just keep her from taking that baby to the press.”
Nobody made a face. Nobody in that room reacted at all, because I’d said a completely ordinary sentence in a completely ordinary voice, and men in that room have heard versions of it a hundred times, and they know exactly what it means and they went and did it.
Janelle catches me in the hall afterward with her hand on my arm, which she has never done.
“Don’t sign anything today.”
“It’s a protective filing.”
“Don’t sign anything today, Shane. Read it in the morning when you’ve slept.”
“It’s Dale. Dale’s been doing this since before I had a band.”
“That’s not a reason, that’s a habit.” She lets go. “You’ve had one person doing your thinking for seventeen years and it’s put you where you’re standing. Read it yourself.”
“I will.”
Something comes over from Dale’s office at four. It’s forty pages. I open it on my phone in a car and read the first page and a half, and the first page and a half is a caption and a list of parties and a paragraph of definitions. I don’t read the rest.
It was long and it was legal and there was a man on the other end of it whose entire job is knowing what should be in it, and looking at page two would have meant sitting with the fact that I was filing something against her, and I didn’t want to sit with that in the back of a car.
So I put my thumb on the button and I sent it back.
The call comes the next afternoon from a woman at Dale’s firm named Tanya, who I have met twice and who has never called me directly.
“Mr. Danner, I’m sorry, I just need to confirm the service address for this afternoon. We have a studio and a residential.”
“Service address for what.”
There’s a pause on that call that goes on a long time.
“The emergency motion,” she says. “It went in this morning.”
I get up out of the chair. It goes over behind me and nobody picks it up.
“Read it to me.”
“Sir?”
“The part about her. Read me the part about her.”
Paper moving. She reads it in a flat professional voice, and it’s a paragraph about financial instability, and a paragraph about a criminal incident at the residence, which is what they’ve decided to call somebody throwing a brick at her, and a line about reason to believe the mother has monetized access to the minor child.
And then a request that the court restrain her from removing the child from the county.
“Sir, I want to be sure, because it’s an aggressive filing and I did flag that. Our instruction was that speed was essential.”
“Whose instruction?”
“Yours,” she says. “It came back signed.”
Out the window New York is bright and completely ordinary and going about its day.
“Where’s the courier now?”
“He should be at the studio address shortly.”
The studio address. Which has plywood over the front of it because somebody threw a brick through the window with our daughter’s face wrapped around it.
I stand there with the phone against my ear and I can hear the office on the other end, printers, somebody laughing at something two desks away, an entire building full of people doing their jobs correctly.
I did this. There’s nobody to hand it to.
A father for less than a week, and already I’m fucking it all up.