Who Do I Lean On? (31 page)

The judge shook her head. Clearly she wasn't buying it. “Thank you, Mr. Fairbanks. I'm sure you think you had your reasons. But I am ruling in favor of the petitioner that she has been unlawfully removed from her home and may return immediately.”

I scribbled a furious note for Lee.
No!

Lee spoke up. “Your Honor, my client has since been able to find alternative and adequate housing for herself and her children, and has no desire to return to her former place of residence. We are requesting a financial settlement instead to help cover her alternative housing expenses.”

I was watching Philip. He seemed to flinch.

The judge considered. “Hm. Do you have a statement of expenses?”

“We do.” Lee strode forward with a financial statement that included my meager salary and monthly rent for the apartment in the six-flat. The judge looked it over.

“Your Honor!” protested Mr. Hoffman. “Mrs. Fairbanks has recently come into a family inheritance that is allowing her to purchase the whole building! I hardly think she needs financial assistance—”

The judge glanced up at Lee, who was still standing by her desk. “Is this true?”

Lee nodded. “Yes. We have included that on the financial statement . . . there, on the bottom. However, Mrs. Fairbanks is still currently renting, and legally, her family inheritance—which she knew nothing about at the time of her unlawful eviction— has nothing to do with this case. The fact is, Philip Fairbanks unlawfully removed his wife from her place of residence, and in lieu of returning to that residence, she deserves financial assistance to maintain an alternative residence for herself and her children.”

Lee returned to our table. I smiled at him.
Good job
. I'd managed to get by, even without Mom's life insurance, but it was the principle of the thing, wasn't it?

The judge studied the sheet of paper she'd been given. Finally she said, “I agree. I will decide the financial amount after we deal with the custody petition, since this case involves residence for the children.” She took up a second folder. “I understand Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks have worked out a mutual agreement that their two children”—she consulted the folder—“Philip, Jr., age fourteen, and Paul, age twelve, should reside primarily with their mother with weekly overnight visitation with their father. Is this correct?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” Both lawyers spoke together, like Siamese twins. But Mr. Hoffman plowed on. “Which puzzles my client,” he said, “why a Petition for Temporary Custody is necessary. He has agreed to his wife's wishes in this matter and the boys are currently living with their mother with weekend visits to their father.”

“But as you can see, Your Honor,” Lee countered, “at the time that Mrs. Fairbanks was unlawfully evicted from their home, her husband disappeared with the children, their whereabouts unknown to their mother. It is against the possibility of that occurrence happening again that my client is requesting temporary custody.”

Mr. Hoffman threw out his hands. “My client simply took the boys to their grandparents, where, I might add, they had been staying previously when Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks first moved to Chicago in order to finish out their school year. Mrs. Fairbanks was not prohibited from communicating with her sons at any time.”

Sudden tears threatened to undo me. The fear and desperation I'd felt when I didn't know where they were in that first twenty-four hours rose to the surface like boils about to pop. Sensing I might break down, Lee laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Breathe, Gabby . . . breathe
.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Philip conferring with his lawyer. Was he going to bring up me leaving P.J. in the school parking lot? After a long minute, Mr. Hoffman straightened. “Your Honor, my client agrees to ‘no contest' to the custody petition— provided that the financial settlement for the, uh, ‘unlawful eviction' is waived.”

The judge shook her head, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing. But I motioned to Lee. “Tell the judge we accept!” I whispered. “I don't want his money. I want custody. Do it!”

“But, Gabby—”

“Just do it, Lee!”

chapter 30

Too rattled to go back to work, I went straight to my car after getting off the El at the Sheridan station, picked up Paul from Sunnyside, and took him out to McDonald's for burgers and shakes. I said, “Uh-huh” and “Really?” as Paul burbled nonstop about an annoying kid who played first-chair trumpet in the band, but I kept seeing Philip's face as we left the courtroom. For a split second, our eyes had met. He could have been gloating—Lee was angry about the deal we'd made, letting Philip get off scot-free financially—but to me, Philip seemed . . . tired. Sad.

But hanging out with Paul managed to keep me distracted until it was time to pick up P.J. and Jermaine. Paul scooted over in the backseat to make room for Jermaine and bombarded him with questions. “Hey, 'member that smokin' piece you played at my birthday party? Could you teach those chords to me? What else you been doin'?”

P.J. said nothing in the front seat, but he did look my way, questions in his eyes about the custody hearing. I tried to give him a reassuring smile. “It's all okay,” I murmured. “Nothing has changed.”

Philip pulled up right at six to pick up the boys, giving a quick toot of the horn outside. I was just as glad he didn't come to the door. We hadn't spoken at the hearing either. What was there to say? The judge had given me custody of our sons and Philip had pleaded “no contest” in exchange for “no consequences” for kicking me out. Who won? I did, I guess. Except . . . for some reason, I wanted to cry.

Which I did on and off all that evening, using up the last box of tissues and half a roll of toilet paper, feeling that something was terribly wrong. I'd just secured legal custody of the boys— “temporary custody,” the judge reminded me, since we were just separated, not divorced—and yet here I was, alone, the rest of my family off doing something without me. Lee had tried to ask me out, wanted to take me to dinner “to celebrate,” he said, but I'd turned him down. What was there to celebrate? My marriage was in the pits, my sons had to straddle two households, had to divide themselves between mom and dad, and whatever had been good about my marriage with Philip had somehow been lost in a tsunami of . . . of what? Each of us pulling our own way until the bond that held us together had stretched too far and snapped.

Jodi Baxter called to find out how it went and said, “Praise God!” when I told her the judge had granted both petitions. So why didn't I feel like praising God?

Between sniffles, I managed to sort the boys' dirty laundry and lug it down to the basement where two ancient washing machines and one beat-up dryer sat mostly unused, but I didn't feel like going out to the Laundromat. Even as I stuffed jeans and towels into the largest top-loader, Philip's complaint to the judge and Mabel's concerns she'd shared in her office seemed to drip down on me from the musty walls.
“Without consulting me
” . . .
“You didn't talk it over with your husband” . . . “No marriage can tolerate that kind of behind-the-back decision making for long
.”

Frustrated, I poured laundry detergent on top of the clothes without bothering to measure and banged the washer lid down as it started to fill. Hadn't Mabel apologized for making me feel I was to blame for ending up in the shelter? And she'd called Philip's actions “emotional abuse.”

But a quiet Voice somewhere in my spirit whispered,
That doesn't make her concerns any less true
.

I couldn't deal with this! Pawing through the boys' collection of DVDs in the living room, I stuck
Napoleon Dynamite
into the DVD player and zoned out in front of the TV . . . at least until I went downstairs to switch laundry loads, only to find suds had poured out of the washer and all over the floor, and the load had shut down somewhere in the middle of the rinse cycle.

Loud knocking in the front foyer the next morning sent me scurrying into the building hallway wondering who was making such a racket at eight in the morning. But I had to grin seeing Josh and Edesa Baxter on the other side of the glass-paneled door, loaded down with cans of primer and spackle, sandpaper, spackling tape, and paint rollers and brushes. I yanked the door open. “Sorry! The buzzer doesn't seem to work. Aren't you guys up kinda early?”

Josh dumped his armload in the hallway. “Unnh. Gracie woke up at five . . . Do I smell fresh coffee? Make you a deal. I'll look at what's wrong with the buzzer if you'll bring me a really big mug of joe—just black.” He propped open the foyer door with a can of primer. “Do the other buzzers work?”

“I think so—at least for the two empty apartments.” I headed for the kitchen, Edesa on my heels. “Wait until I tell him I flooded the washing machine in the basement,” I murmured, pulling out two more mugs. “Maybe he won't want this job as property manager after all . . . Where's Gracie?”

“Grandma Jodi agreed to babysit so we could actually get some work done. She and Denny are taking care of DaShawn too. Gracie adores DaShawn! Hopefully she'll keep him distracted so he doesn't worry about his Grandpa Harry too much.”

Harry! I'd almost forgotten about his eye surgery
. I poured the coffee. “How's Mr. B doing? Did his procedure go okay?”

Edesa shrugged. “
Sí
, I think so. I don't really understand what they did. I just know he has to lie still for several more days—on his side, I think—and it's driving him
loco
.” She circled her finger in the air. “Or maybe he's driving Estelle
loco
, not sure which.”

I laughed. “I can just imagine . . . Wait a sec, let me take Josh his coffee.”

Josh had the buzzer assembly dismantled, peering into the tangle of wires, and only grunted when I set his coffee on the floor, so I turned to go. But he called me back. “Mrs. Fairbanks? I was just thinking . . . if Precious and Tanya would like to come over today, I could get them started spackling the walls in the first-floor apartment too. I think we've got enough to do both apartments.”

“Which I need to reimburse you for, by the way. I'll call Manna House and see if they can come over. But when are you going to stop calling me Mrs. Fairbanks? Edesa calls me Gabby, why not you?”

Josh actually blushed. “Ah, see, it's a little awkward for me, because you're my
mother's
friend, and she always taught me . . . well, you know, it's rude to call adults by their first name. And I'm still in college, you know. But Edesa got to know my mom in that Yada Yada Prayer Group, so Edesa has always called her Jodi . . .”

I laughed. “You are so funny, Josh Baxter. You're a married man and a daddy—I think that qualifies you as an adult, college or no college. So call me Gabby, okay?”

He shrugged, giving me a shy grin. “Okay. I'll try. And thanks for the coffee.” He took his first sip gratefully. “
Some
body needs to tell the Little People that the Big People want to sleep in on weekends—especially when
this
Big People had to stay up late last night writing a paper.”

I left him to tinker with the buzzer . . . but that's how I ended up driving over to Manna House and picking up Precious and Tanya, who were eager to get to work on their apartment. I tied a big bandana over my hair and joined in, at which point we all decided to work on the third-floor apartment first, and then all work together on the first-floor apartment, since Precious, Tanya, and I didn't really know what we were doing, though I remembered hating the sanding part the time Philip and I repainted our big old house back in Petersburg.

I made sandwiches for everybody at noon, and then excused myself for an hour or so after lunch to go see how Harry Bentley was doing. “By the time you get back, the spackle will be dry enough for sanding,” Josh teased.

“Oh great. My favorite part,” I moaned, wondering if I should change my clothes, then deciding it wasn't worth the effort to change back again.

I didn't plan to stay long visiting Mr. B—frankly, I'd never been to his apartment before and it felt a little strange to get this intimate look behind the man I'd first known as the doorman of Richmond Towers—but I was surprised to hear laughter and childish voices when Estelle opened the door. “Jodi and Denny brought Gracie and DaShawn over,” she explained, but put her finger to her mouth as she led me into the small living room. “Shh, the kids are doing a ‘smelling game' for Harry.”

“A what?” Mr. Bentley sat on the old-fashioned couch, head bowed forward, chin on his chest. White gauze patches covered both eyes. For the first time it hit me what it must be like for him not to be able to see a thing . . . no, on second thought, I couldn't really imagine it, only knew it must be frightening.