Starter House A Novel (8 page)

Chapter Nine

LEX HALL NEEDED A LAWYER.
In the telephone book, there were ten pages of lawyers. Some of them listed only their names, and he didn’t trust them because they didn’t say what kind of lawyers they were; he remembered there were different lawyers for different kinds of trouble. Some of them had a whole page in the book, with pictures of themselves smiling, and he didn’t trust them either, because why were they so happy? The law was a terrible thing. So he called his uncle Harry, and the old man said, “I sold the house to a lawyer. Call him.”

The woman who answered the phone had a friendly voice. Lex came into the lawyer’s office holding the big manila envelope across his chest. It had arrived yesterday, Monday, delivered by hand at MacArthur’s, when he was in the back sorting avocados. The soft avocados went into the “Buy Me Today” bin at half price. A man in a blue windbreaker came into the back, carrying a clipboard. “Andrew Lexington Hall?” he said and handed him the envelope and was gone before Lex knew what had happened.

The thing was only four pages long. It took a long time to read. Lex could read as well as anybody. He had his GED. He didn’t have any trouble reading, but his mind slid away from the words. He worried about the avocados.

Petitioner
.
Respondent
.
Dissolution of marriage
. He thought someone must be suing him and Jeanne, because her name was all over it. On his lunch break, he called the old man and read it to him, even though the break room was full of cashiers, listening to him and giggling behind their hands.

“It means divorce,” the old man said.

“Then why is Jeanne’s name here?” He still couldn’t understand. And so many of the avocados were already soft. The delivery truck must have parked in the sun. These things weren’t supposed to happen.

“Jeanne’s divorcing you,” the old man said. “You need a lawyer.”

No lawyer had ever helped Lex, no matter who paid them, the old man or the state or whoever. They knew one another, lawyers. They went out together and drank in the same bars. He wasn’t stupid; he knew. “Jeanne’s got a lawyer,” he said. He’d found the name on the last page. Cambrick MacAvoy. One lawyer was okay. You only got into real trouble when there were two lawyers.

“That’s Jeanne’s lawyer,” the old man said. “You need your own.”

So here was Lex in the front office of Moranis Miszlak, an expensive room that smelled of perfumed men and dry-cleaned cotton and fancy magazines. At the back of the room, at a big curved desk, sat a golden-skinned black woman with soft straight hair, and she looked at the manila envelope all greasy from his clutching hands, and she judged him. People always did. They looked at him and they knew. Even if they didn’t know what they knew, they smelled it on him.

The shiny girl looked away from the envelope, like she was sorry for him. She pressed a button on her desk phone and said, “Eric, your four o’clock’s here,” and then she went back to her computer. Not once had she raised her hazel eyes to look at Lex. People didn’t, especially women.

“My wife’s divorcing me,” he told her. Petition for dissolution of marriage. Petition meant asking. Just because you asked for something didn’t mean you’d get it. “It’s not right,” he said to the shiny girl.

Now she looked at him. Her eyebrows were as black and clean as if they’d been drawn with a Sharpie. “Mr. Miszlak will take care of you,” she said.

The Miszlak lawyer was shorter than Lex expected, and younger, too young to have his name on the front door of the big office. It was thirty years since Lex had much to do with lawyers, but he remembered if your name was on the door, you were the big dog. This was not the big dog. He was short, with reddish-brown hair and a tight mouth. Lex followed him down a white hallway with glass doors.

The young lawyer’s office was around two corners and past a water fountain. It was a little room with no windows and a torn-up vinyl floor. “Your name’s on the door,” Lex said, to get that clear in his mind. Names were hard. “Miszlak, that’s you.”

“I’m Eric Miszlak. Floyd Miszlak’s my uncle. Technically it’s his name on the door, not mine.”

“And you’re my lawyer.”

“If you retain me, yes.”

“Really my lawyer. Not the court’s lawyer. Mine.” Lex knew about the court’s lawyers. They promised to do all they could, to help if he told them everything, but they never did. He knew not to talk to any lawyer but his own.

“Absolutely,” the young lawyer said.

They weren’t allowed to lie. Lex pulled the old man’s check from his windbreaker. “Mr. Rakoczy’s paying your retainer?” the young lawyer asked. He sounded surprised. Lex didn’t know why. Everybody knew the old man.

“Can you help me?”

“What do you want, Mr. Hall?”

“Can I stop her?” The lawyer was shaking his head. Lex tried to make his question clear. “Can she divorce me? She’s my wife.”

“It’s the law, Mr. Hall. She can divorce you whenever she wants. All I can do is represent you and make sure the settlement’s fair. I need information. Any kids?”

“Theo. She’ll be a year old in October. Can she do that? Jeanne? Can she just take her and leave?”

“Where did she go?”

“She went to her mom’s house and she won’t let me see Theo. Can she do that?”

“No. You have parental rights. We’ll get a temporary order. The court will appoint someone to represent your daughter. They’re called the guardian ad litem and they’ll get in touch with you.” The lawyer pulled a pad of yellow paper onto the desk and started making notes. “So she left you in the marital home. Do you own or rent?”

Lex didn’t care about the house. He’d bought it with the money the old man gave him for the other house. Jeanne could have the house, but she couldn’t have Theo. The lawyer had to understand. “I want my baby,” he said.

“The court usually leaves a baby with the primary caregiver. Is that you?”

“Are you the court’s lawyer or my lawyer?”

“Yours, your lawyer. I can’t help you by making false promises. We can go for joint custody. That’s the best you’ll get. Sole custody, not a chance, unless there’s abuse and you can prove it. That gets very ugly, very fast. I’m not going to waste your money and your time fighting for something you’ll never get.”

Lex reached into the greasy envelope for the pictures he’d brought. There was Jeanne, with her gold-blond curls and her bright pink face that spread out onto her shoulders. Her cheeks were wider than her forehead, her neck wider than her cheeks, her chin a pink bump in the broad meat of her throat.

“She’s a lot younger than you,” the lawyer said.

“She’s twenty. She was always big.” Lex knew he wasn’t being clear. “I bring fruit and vegetables. She takes my money that I bring home and she eats cheeseburgers for breakfast, and she feeds my baby.” He brought out the second picture: Theo with her fluff of dandelion-seed hair, her laughing face. She wore a white lace dress. Her arms bulged out of the short sleeves, and her cheeks were round pads of fat.

“Your wife’s unfit because she feeds the baby too much?”

“I need to take care of her.” That was as clear as he could be. It had to be enough.

The lawyer laid the pictures on his printer. “I’ll scan these into your file. We’ll depose the pediatrician. You need evidence. That means you need to be able to prove—”

“I know what evidence is.”

The lawyer gave him the pictures. “Mr. Hall, I’ll be honest with you. It’s a long shot. You’re calling it child abuse, the way your wife’s feeding Theo?”

Lex nodded hard. The lawyer was young, but he was quick. Child abuse.

“You’d have a better case if you’d filed on her.”

“I was going to.” And it was true, though he hadn’t known it until he heard himself saying it. “I told her, you keep feeding my baby cupcakes and corn dogs, I’ll take her and leave you. I told her, you can’t do that to my baby.”

“You said you didn’t want her to divorce you.”

“What I meant was, I wanted to go first and take Theo, because it’s not right. Jeanne was quicker than me is all.” It should have been true; it was as good as true.

The lawyer typed as Lex spoke. “Good. You get me Theo’s medical records, and I’ll get your custody hearing on the calendar.”

Lex stood up. “You’re a good lawyer,” he said. “You like avocados?”

“What I’d like is evidence good enough to make a family court judge take a ten-month-old baby away from her mother. If every chubby kid got taken into protective custody, we’d have to build a ranch the size of Texas to keep them in.”

“I can take more pictures. Better pictures.”

“Do that. I’ll get started on custody and visitation.”

The lawyer walked around the desk to shake Lex’s hand. People didn’t get close to Lex. Men, when they shook his hand, kept their arms straight to hold him off. Women crossed their arms when he came too close, and they never shook his hand at all. This was the first time a man who had a desk had walked around instead of reaching across. Lex let the hand drop—he was never sure how to stop shaking hands; was he supposed to pull away or let go or squeeze harder? There was a way to do it and he never found out how—and he backed out of the room.

Chapter Ten

ERIC WAS RIGHT,
as he so often was. It made Lacey tired. One of these days he’d be wrong about something, and his head would explode. She laughed at the childish thought, though she was ashamed of it. He was the living twin of her teacher voice, an essential part of herself. He’d suggested she call the OB who’d seen her at the hospital, because sooner or later she’d end up in the hospital anyway. Dr. Vlk, it turned out, had a private practice, and her nurse found room in the schedule for Lacey on Monday, August 22.

The baby was twenty-two weeks old. Dr. Vlk, dressed not in scrubs but a gray skirt-suit and pearls, turned the ultrasound machine so Lacey could see him. He grabbed his umbilical cord and pulled on it.

“Can’t you make him stop?” Lacey said.

“The placenta’s stabilized. See the white band? That’s scar tissue. It looks good.”

Lacey wanted to ask
will he live?
but she didn’t trust her voice—this good news brought her closer to tears than all the weeks of fear and doubt. He was the size of a Cornish game hen. Half his body was head. He turned his face, and Lacey saw his profile, his beautiful little nose, his short upper lip. Dr. Vlk took the picture and said, “We’re getting a good heartbeat and lots of kicking. You can start exercising a little, short walks, but still no heavy lifting.”

Lacey felt safe in Dr. Vlk’s hands.
Will he live?
A good heartbeat and lots of kicking: she’d take that. She even tried a little joke. “Dr. Vlk,” she said, “wouldn’t you like to buy a vowel?”

Dr. Vlk was not a woman for jokes, not with those pearls. She had the look of the veteran teacher who’d mentored Lacey through her first semester of practice teaching, a natural mind reader, terrifying but comforting too. Dr. Vlk looked into Lacey and through her, as Mrs. Ravenel used to look at students. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“If the baby’s fine, I’m fine.”

“We don’t have time for me to be your psychiatrist.”

Some bedside manner. “What happens if I start bleeding again?” Lacey asked.

Dr. Vlk’s eyes were a silvery blue, almost as light as her hair. This was a woman who could not lie. “He’s about viable,” she said. “The longer he cooks, the better he’s done. The outcome’s not what you’d want till you’re past thirty weeks. Thirty-five is better. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Lacey swung her feet off the examination table. “We’re fine,” she said. As a teacher, she’d known when students were in trouble, often before the students knew it themselves. More than once, she’d kept a child in before recess to ask what was wrong and received a wide-eyed
Nothing
in return, only to find the child in tears a week later: parents divorcing, big brother on drugs, Grandma terminally ill. If Lacey, with only three years in the classroom, could see this much, how much more could Dr. Vlk see, having given good news and bad for thirty years or more.

“You’re not fine. How does Dad feel about the baby?”

Lacey wanted to say Eric was thrilled, they were both so happy, and her own voice surprised her: “Scared. He’s got this new job, and we moved. It’s hard.”

Dr. Vlk handed her a box of tissues and said, “Have you talked with him?”

“Oh! Talked with him! I’d have to make an appointment. He’s working twelve hours a day, and I’m going to whine about some weird feeling? There are noises.”

“It’s an older house?”

“My grandpa had an old house. You could hear things, voices in the walls; it’s only noise, I know that.” Her mother had always said there were ghosts in Grandpa Merritt’s house, but not to be afraid of them, because they were peaceful spirits, interested only in each other, a family from long ago. “But there’s this feeling on the stairs. What’s wrong with me?”

What a relief to ask the question, to admit something might be wrong—a thing she could never say to her husband or mother. To Lacey’s surprise, Dr. Vlk took her seriously. “Pregnancy makes your body wise,” Dr. Vlk said. “Morning sickness keeps you from eating dangerous food. Fear keeps you from doing dangerous things. Fear is your friend. Trust yourself. Can you live downstairs?”