The porch light on my side of the duplex was still burnt out because I kept forgetting to buy the seventy-five-cent bulbs from the hardware store on Douglas Avenue. I was standing there in the damp Kansas grass trying to fit my house key into the brass lock while holding a plastic grocery bag of sliced turkey and generic saltines when my little girl, Maya, reached down and grabbed the hem of my denim skirt. Her shoes were scuffed at the toes.
She had worn those little pink sneakers with the velcro straps when her father picked her up on Friday afternoon after my shift at the credit union ended.
She didn’t run inside to check the cartoon channel like she usually did. She just stood there under the yellow glow of the neighbor’s porch light looking up at me with her mouth slightly open, that little space between her front teeth showing in the dark.
Maya looked up and asked, “Mommy, why does Daddy’s girlfriend lock the closet when I’m bad?”
I missed the keyhole entirely. The metal scraped against the white paint of the doorframe with a dry screech that made my teeth ache. I just stopped breathing right there on the top step. My lungs felt like they had filled up with cold river water. The plastic grocery bag handle bit into the meat of my fingers until they went numb.
“What closet, honey?” I managed to say. My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded thin and dry, like someone whispering through an empty tin can.
“The one in the hallway,” she said, her little voice entirely too calm, too used to the rules of a house that wasn’t mine. “It’s dark. She puts me in there when Daddy goes to the store.”
Arthur and I had been divorced for three years, ever since he decided that working forty hours a week at the grain elevator wasn’t nearly as exciting as running off with a twenty-four-year-old receptionist named Brenda who sold Mary Kay out of the trunk of a Grand Am. We had a signed custody agreement filed down at the Sedgwick County courthouse. Every other weekend, Friday at five to Sunday at seven. I always packed her extra socks. I always made sure she had her chewable vitamins in the pink plastic case with the days of the week stamped on the lid in faded black ink.
I didn’t take off my coat. I walked straight to the kitchen table, dropped the groceries right on top of the mail pile, and picked up the heavy cordless phone with the cracked screen. My hands were shaking so hard I dropped the receiver back onto the cradle twice before I managed to punch in Arthur’s ten-digit number from memory. I had dialed that number a thousand times back when we still shared a mortgage and a gravel driveway.
He answered on the third ring with that annoyed sigh he always used when I called about dental appointments or ballet shoes. “What?” he said. There was the sound of a television game show barking in the background, someone yelling about a new washing machine.
“Arthur,” I said. I wasn’t yelling. I wanted to yell, but my throat was too tight to let the noise out. “What did you do to Maya?”
“Good grief, Clara, it’s Sunday night,” he said, and I could hear the ice shifting in a glass on his end. “She’s right here. She’s eating a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. What now?”
“She told me about the closet, Arthur.”
There was a long pause on the line. The game show kept howling in the background, but Arthur went dead quiet. That silence told me more than anything he could have shouted.
“She’s exaggerating,” he said finally, his voice dropping an octave into that flat, defensive register he used when the manager at the elevator caught him sleeping on the loading dock. “It was once. For five minutes. She tracked mud right across Brenda’s new hall runner after soccer practice.”
I felt something hot and ugly snap right behind my ribs. “Once is enough,” I whispered.
“She was crying and carrying on, Clara, you know how she gets when she doesn’t get her way,” he started, but I didn’t wait to hear the rest of his excuse about the carpet or the stress or Brenda’s nerves.
I slammed the receiver down onto the plastic base so hard the battery cover popped off and skittered across the linoleum floor. I stood there in the quiet kitchen for a long minute listening to the hum of the old refrigerator. My mother used to say that anger was just grief with its teeth bared, but I didn’t feel grief right then. I felt like I was made of iron wire and broken glass.
By eight o’clock Monday morning, I was sitting in the vinyl waiting room of an attorney named Robert Vance whose office smelled like stale pipe tobacco and damp law books. He didn’t look up from his yellow legal pad for a full two minutes while I laid the whole messy story out on his blotter. He had wisps of gray hair combed straight across an otherwise bare pink scalp, and he wore a tie that looked like it had survived the Carter administration.
“Retainer is four thousand five hundred dollars,” he said, finally looking over the top of his half-moon reading glasses. “Cash, cashier’s check, or major credit card. We file an emergency motion for temporary custody restriction this morning. If the judge agrees there’s an immediate physical danger, we get an ex parte order before lunch.”
I didn’t even blink. I pulled my checkbook out of my purse and wrote the numbers out so hard the ballpoint pen tore a little hole right through the paper where the decimal point went.
The judge was a woman named Henderson who wore heavy silver bracelets that clinked together every time she turned a page in the file. She didn’t look impressed with me, and she looked even less impressed with Arthur when Mr. Vance read Maya’s exact words back into the court record. She signed the temporary order with a black fountain pen without asking Arthur’s lawyer for his side of the story. The hearing for the full modification was set for Thursday morning at nine o’clock sharp in Courtroom Three-B.
Tuesday afternoon at 2:15, I was standing behind my teller window at the credit union, counting out five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills for an old man who wanted to buy a riding lawnmower, when the desk phone behind me rang. Brenda, the head teller, motioned with her chin for me to grab it.
“Clara James?” the voice said. It was Mrs. Gable, Maya’s first-grade teacher down at Lincoln Elementary. She sounded different than she did during parent-teacher conferences. Her voice had that tight, flat professional edge people use when they are reading from an incident report they wish they didn’t have to sign.
“Yes, Mrs. Gable? Is Maya sick? Did she fall on the blacktop?”
“No, Clara, Maya is sitting right here in my office with the school nurse,” she said, and I could hear the faint rustle of paper in the background. “Your daughter drew something in art class today during free period. She used those big primary-color markers we keep in the blue plastic bins by the sink.”
I gripped the edge of the laminate counter so hard my knuckles turned the color of lard. “What did she draw?”
“I’ve already reported it to the state hotline, Clara,” Mrs. Gable said, and for the first time her voice cracked just a little bit, dropping that professional armor. “I’m legally required to do it. But Mr. Vance or whoever is representing you needs to know right now that the Thursday hearing might not matter much anyway.”
“Why?” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. “What are you talking about?”
“Because child services officers went out to her father’s house on Maplewood Drive ten minutes ago,” Mrs. Gable said softly. “The neighbor across the street called them after she saw Brenda dragging a suitcase out to the porch and screaming at Arthur on the front lawn. They’re already inside the house, Clara. They found the latch on the outside of the hallway door.”
I didn’t answer her. I didn’t say goodbye. I just set the receiver down on the cradle, took off my green teller vest right there in front of seventy years of credit union history, and walked out the glass front doors into the Kansas wind without looking back once.
