Me: I don’t know. He’s gone now.
Me: Barney had a REALLY dirty look on his face.
Charlie: I have so many questions about this.
Me: I have no answers.
Charlie: Was it a good tattoo?
Me: Depends on what you’re into.“Thanks for being on time,” a voice says behind me, and I turn.
“I know you’re always on time,” Lucinda, my lawyer, goes on. “But lately I’ve been trying to encourage good habits in my clients. You look good. Half-Windsor?”
I touch the knot in my tie.
I like Lucinda. I’ve liked her since the moment I first walked into her office, six years ago, and we’ve been a team ever since. We’re a somewhat odd pairing — a middle-aged black woman and a white man in his late twenties — but Lucinda’s a godsend, as far as I’m concerned.
“It is,” I say.
“That’s a good choice,” she says, then finally smiles. “How are you doing, Daniel?”
“I’m well, Lucinda,” I say, smoothing one hand over the front of my jacket. “Yourself?”
“Also well,” she says, then sighs and gestures to a bench along a wall. “We should sit.”
My palms suddenly start to sweat, my heart rate jumping up. Lucinda never tells me to sit for good news, but I do it anyway, the wooden bench cool.
“Holden Hughes is going to be the judge on this case,” she says bluntly, her tone of voice making it clear that this is bad news. “I’m sure opposing counsel managed that somehow, and I don’t like it, but we can’t change it.”
I simply nod, spine perfectly straight, hands folded in front of me, and wait for more.
“Judge Hughes has a certain reputation,” she says, matter-of-factly. “He’s old school, conservative, and frankly he wishes it were still the Eisenhower administration, so he doesn’t like me much,” Lucinda goes on.
I detect the tiniest of eyebrow quirks, as if somewhere, deep down inside, she takes pride in that fact.
“Most pertinent to our current issue, he has a long history of siding with mothers over fathers,” she goes on, and she looks me dead in the eye as she says it.
I nod sharply. Lucinda never sugarcoats things, and I love her for that.
“It’s widely known that he believes in a traditional family structure,” she says, waving a hand. “The usual, married parents, father goes off to work at the office, mother stays home with the children, she vacuums while he golfs, et cetera. And he’s not exactly keen on updating his views, from what I’ve heard.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. There’s a sharp look in her eye.
Shit, Lucinda hates Judge Holden.
The buzzing anxiety in my chest starts to rattle, like someone’s taken my heart and is shaking it. It feels like it’s going to shake a hole straight through me, and I realize that I’m rubbing my hands together over and over again, trying to calm the feeling.
“What do we do?” I ask, amazed at how calm my voice sounds.
“We do exactly what we were going to do,” she says, steely-voiced. “We show the visitation logs, how often she’s cancelled at the last moment, how willing you are to meet her more than halfway.”
I nod, my heart still rattling.
“We show the court your daughter’s report cards, her school records, the statements from her teachers, her dance instructor. We prove that she’s thriving in her current situation. And Daniel,” she says, lightly touching my arm. “We remember that this hearing is only a petition to change the current visitation arrangement.”
I nod, swallow. I’m still rubbing my hands together. I can’t stop.
“Of course,” I say. I still sound perfectly cool, calm, and collected, even though I’m anything but.
Going to court rattles me like nothing else. It always has. Every single time I put on a suit and walk through these doors, I’m instantly and inescapably aware of two things:
One, I don’t belong here, wearing a suit and tie, looking like a stockbroker or something. This is the only suit I own. This tie took me at least twenty minutes to get right. I may look the part but really, I’m a fraud. I don’t know how to tie a tie very well and I don’t know how to parent any better, even though I thought I would by now. But I don’t. Every single day I’m making it up as I go along, even though everyone else at the PTA meetings seems to have a plan.
Two, they could take her away.
That’s it. That’s the very worst thing that could happen to me, and it could happen here, ten minutes from now, and the judge that Lucinda hates could be the one to do it. I can tell myself a million reasons that it’s unlikely, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a possibility.
I could walk into that courtroom with full physical and legal custody of Rusty, and I could walk out with nothing.