The Pan of Bars on Nicole’s Porch
Nicole did not look at me when she walked up to the witness chair. She looked at the flag behind the judge, and then at her hands, and then at Shane’s lawyer.
I had known that face since we were seven years old. I knew it scared, and I knew it sick, and I knew it lying to her mother about a boy. I had never seen it pointed away from me.
“Mrs. Haas,” Shane’s lawyer said, “how long have you known Amber Lutz?”
“Since second grade,” Nicole said. “Thirty-four years.”
“Would you say you know her habits?”
“Yes.”
My lawyer, a tired man named Tom Kessler who had driven over from Janesville, wrote something on his legal pad. My dad sat on the bench behind me in his good flannel shirt. I could hear him breathing through his nose, the way he did when a cow would not load.
“Mrs. Haas, in your opinion, does Amber drink?”
Nicole swallowed. The courtroom on the second floor of the Green County courthouse in Monroe is old and quiet, and the radiators knock, and I heard every one of them before she answered.
“Yes,” she said. “Too much. I don’t think she should have the kids on her own the way she does.”
I do not drink. I have not had a drink since a wine cooler at the county fair in 1999, and I threw that one up behind the 4-H barn, and Nicole was the one who held my hair.
I am a school cook. I have worked the kitchen at our elementary for eleven years, which means I am up at 4:45 and standing over a tilt skillet of taco meat by six. You cannot do that job hungover. You cannot do it tired, half the time.
Shane and I were divorced almost three years before that hearing. It was not a dramatic divorce. He worked too much, and I stopped waiting up, and one spring we both noticed we had not said anything true to each other since Christmas.
We had a placement order like most people in Wisconsin do. The kids, Kenzie and Brody, lived with me. Shane had every other weekend and Wednesday suppers, and he mostly kept them.
Then in September he filed to change it. He wanted equal time, week on and week off, and to get it after that long, his lawyer had to show the judge something had changed.
The something was me. It was a picture from Nicole’s fortieth birthday at the supper club out on the county road, of me holding a wine glass and laughing. The glass had sparkling grape juice in it. Nicole knew that. She poured it.
We went to mediation in November because the county makes you. Shane sat across the table and would not look at me either. The mediator gave up after two hours and wrote down that we had not reached agreement.
The guardian ad litem came to my house once. She was a young woman with a nice scarf and a clipboard. She looked in my refrigerator, which had milk, ketchup, and three pans of leftover hotdish, and she wrote something down.