The Pan of Bars on Nicole’s Porch
I thought that was the end of it. I thought nobody who knew me could say otherwise.
The judge did not decide that day in the courtroom. She took it under advisement and mailed the order a week later, on a Monday, and I opened it at the kitchen table before work with my coat still on.
Equal placement. Week on, week off, exchanges at Sunday at six. On my weeks, I was ordered to use a breath test on a phone app twice a day, at eight in the morning and eight at night, for six months, at my own cost. Eighty-nine dollars a month.
I read the order three times. Then I went to work, because four hundred kids still needed lunch, and I made chicken patties on buns and green beans and peaches in light syrup, and I did not cry until the second lunch wave.
Darlene, who runs the dish machine, found me in the walk-in cooler. She did not ask anything. She just stood in there with me in the cold with her arm around my shoulders until the timer went off on the rolls.
“You want me to say something to somebody?” she asked.
“There isn’t anybody to say it to,” I said.
My brother Jeff milks a hundred and twenty cows four miles south of town. He came over that night with his boots still on and stood in my kitchen doorway, too big for it, the way he has been since he was fourteen.
“I’ll go talk to Shane,” he said.
“No.”
“Amber.”
“You’ll go talk to Shane, and then Shane’s lawyer will have a new thing to show the judge,” I said. “Crazy uncle threatens father. That’s what it will say.”
Jeff looked at the floor. He is not a hothead. He is a careful man who fixes his own skid steer and reads the whole manual first. But he loves his nieces and his nephew, and he did not know what to do with his hands.
“Then what are you going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
Dad called later. Dad worked thirty-one years at the cheese plant and does not talk on the phone. He said only, “Your mother would have known what to do,” and then, “I don’t believe a word of it, honey,” and then he hung up because he could not say any more.
Mr. Kessler called on Wednesday. He said I could appeal, or file a motion for reconsideration, but I would need something new. He said it would cost three thousand dollars to start, maybe more.
“Something new like what?” I asked.
“Like your friend changing her story,” he said. “Which people don’t do.”
I sat with that a long time after I hung up. I could have borrowed the money. Jeff would have given it to me before I finished asking.