The Pan of Bars on Nicole’s Porch
He looked at me then. “Amber,” he said, “I never thought you drank.”
“I just… my lawyer said I needed something. He said a reason. Equal time doesn’t happen without a reason, he said. And I thought, she gets them every day, and I get a Wednesday and a Saturday, and I’m missing all of it. I’m missing Brody losing his teeth. I’m missing Kenzie’s whole…”
He stopped.
I understood that too. I did not like that I understood it. But I did.
“You could have asked me,” I said. “You could have just asked me for more time.”
“Would you have said yes?”
I thought about it honestly. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Probably not at first. But you didn’t even try. You went and found a lie instead.”
He put his face in his hands.
Here is what happened next, and I will tell it plainly, because I have been asked a hundred times in the grocery store since.
Shane took the statement to his own lawyer on Monday morning. His lawyer filed it with the court along with a stipulation, signed by Shane, asking to put the old placement back the way it was. Every other weekend, Wednesday suppers. And the breath tests ended.
Mr. Kessler called me on Thursday. “I have been doing this nineteen years,” he said, “and I have never seen a father’s own lawyer file a recantation from his own witness. What on earth did you do?”
“I brought some bars over,” I said.
He was quiet. “Some what?”
“Scotcheroos,” I said.
The judge signed the stipulation the next week. That is the court part. But it is not the part that matters, and I want to be clear about that.
The part that matters is that our town has nine hundred people, and Jean Haas has been in charge of the funeral lunches at our church for thirty years.
By the next Sunday, everybody knew. Not from me. I never said one word about it to anybody but Darlene in the walk-in cooler. But people talk, and Shane had been seen walking into Pastor Dan’s office, and Jean does not lie about anything, ever.
Shane sat in the back pew alone that next Sunday. Nobody was mean to him. But nobody sat next to him, either, and after church the men at the coffee urn talked about the Packers and did not turn around.
His mother called me that week. She cried on the phone and said she was ashamed of him, and I told her not to be, that he was a good dad who had done a bad thing, and that those were two different sentences.
She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “You were always too good for him, Amber.” And I said, “No, I wasn’t. I’m just a school cook,” and we both laughed a little, and that was that.
The note on the body shop, Jean took care of herself. I found out later she cashed in a CD Dale had left her and paid Shane twelve thousand dollars, which was everything past due and then some.