8. Tess
Tess
The cancellations begin almost immediately.
The first two apologize. Number three moves a newborn session out to a date in September that both of us understand isn’t real.
The fourth is a woman named Sharla who booked me eight months ago for her twins’ first birthday and who shows up anyway, on time, with two babies in matching yellow and a diaper bag the size of a duffel.
She’s polite for the whole hour. That’s how I know.
She stands off to the side and answers when I talk to her and never once looks at my face. At the end she asks when the gallery goes up, and then, in the doorway, with a baby on each hip, “My husband saw the thing on the news.”
“A lot of people did.”
“He said we should cancel.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.” She hitches the one on the left. “I told him you’ve never been anything but nice to me.”
Which is generous, and which is also a woman explaining to me why she’s allowing herself to be in my building, and I say thank you and mean it and then go be sick in my own bathroom.
The plywood has been up long enough to feel permanent.
The glass guy has come by twice, and both times I have promised to call because insurance is a word that means paperwork and money I do not have.
There’s a man beside the plywood when I come out with the stroller.
I’ve got my keys through my fingers before I’ve thought about it, and then he says my full name as a question and holds out a folder and I take it because my hand does it.
“You’ve been served, ma’am. Sorry.”
He’s gone quickly. And there’s a woman across the street with a long lens who has been parked in a gray Corolla for three days, and she is absolutely getting this.
Woman on a sidewalk in front of a boarded window with her hand in a folder.
She’ll sell it by dinner. I get Sadie in the car first. I do that much right.
Then I sit sideways in the driver’s seat with my feet on the pavement and read it while the shutter goes.
Financially unstable. Criminal incident at the residence. Reason to believe the mother has monetized access to the minor child.
There’s an exhibit stapled to the back. Somebody has printed the article, the one with my kitchen at three in the morning in it, and attached it as evidence of my character.
I call him. Not the firm. Him, the private line, the one I swore I’d never use again.
It rings once and he picks up so fast the phone must have been in his hand.
“Tess.”
I don’t yell. Somebody will read this call back in a deposition someday and there won’t be a single raised voice in it.
“Yesterday she wasn’t yours. Today you want to take her.”
“I didn’t.”
“It’s got your name on it.”
“I know what’s on it.”
“It’s on the caption and it’s in the signature block and it’s in a sentence about the child’s welfare requiring immediate intervention.
” A car goes past and I wait for it. “You know what my morning was? A woman at the pediatrician asked me if I was that woman trying to ruin your life. Then I photographed twin girls turning one and their mother wouldn’t look at me.
Then I came outside and a man handed me this. ”
“Tess, I told them to file something.”
I stop.
“What.”
“I told them.” His voice has gone somewhere flat. “Do whatever you have to do, and then I said, just keep her from taking that baby to the press. Those were the words. Then they sent me forty pages and I didn’t read it.”
“You didn’t read it.”
“No.”
“Forty pages about my daughter and you didn’t read it.”
“No.”
There’s a long stretch where neither of us says anything.
“That’s worse,” I say.
“I know it is.”
“Do you? Because a lot of men would have taken the other one. The other one was right there. You could have said your manager did it and I’d have believed you, I was already three-quarters of the way to believing you before you opened your mouth.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I thought about it in the car.”
“How long?”
“About a block.”
I put my head back against the seat.
“I’m withdrawing it. Today. This hour. And you should have a real lawyer, not whoever did your studio lease.”
“I’m not taking your money.”
“Then take a loan and let me pay the interest, I don’t care what we call it. Get somebody good in the room, Tess, because I’m the reason there needs to be a room.”
Sadie’s making noise in the back. I reach around and hand her the plastic ring without looking.
“I kept everything.”
“Good.”
“That’s not what I. Every email with a timestamp.
The green card. The letter from your lawyers at the end of the summer that never uses the word baby because somebody was careful about that.
Phone records. The hospital’s admission time.
My mother, who I called crying in March and who writes things on a calendar because she’s that kind of woman.
” My hands have gone steady, which surprises me.
“If you come at me I’m not going to be quiet and dignified.
I did fourteen months of quiet and dignified and it got a brick through my window. ”
“Use them,” he says.
“What?”
“All of it. Don’t hold anything back to be nice to me. If it comes to a room with a judge in it, I want you to walk in there with everything you’ve got, and I want you to use my own words, and I’ll sit there and let it happen.”
“You don’t get points for that.”
“I’m not asking for points. I’m telling you what I’ll do so you can plan around it.”
Somebody says his name in the background, and he says, away from the phone, “No. Stay out there. Give me a minute.”
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s her middle name?”
It comes out of me sideways. I don’t know why I ask it.
“I don’t know.”
“Rae. It was my grandmother’s.”
He breathes out.
“Sadie Rae Broderick,” he says, like he’s checking whether he’s allowed to be holding it.
I hang up.
I sit in the lot with the door open and my hands over my mouth, but the Corolla across the street means even falling apart has to happen privately. Twenty minutes later a text comes in from a number I don’t have saved. A photograph of a screen. A docket line, stamped.
Withdrawn.
Underneath it, one sentence. I’m going to find out how it all happened and I’ll let you know, including the parts where it was my fuck up.
I don’t answer. I don’t delete it either.