Chapter 12: The Petition
Kate Brennan's office smelled of coffee and copier heat, and the petition she set on the desk between us was thicker than the first one by half. Petitions, I was learning, are like winter coats: the stronger they are, the heavier they get.
"Read the list back to me," she said, because Kate believed in saying things out loud so the air could check them. Lease, signed and receipted. Employment, verified, with pay stubs going back six weeks now. Character letters — Rita's, Esther's, Pastor Lind's. And the Beemans' statement, which Kate had set on top like a flag on a hill: Carol and Tom, on the record, in their own words, saying that Micah's sister was his home and that they would help her prove it any way the court allowed.
Kate had a rule: the court doesn't adopt your story, it audits it. "Love is assumed," she said. "Judges assume everybody in the room loves the child. What they're deciding is logistics — who feeds him on a Tuesday in February, who signs the school forms, who notices a fever at midnight." She had made me a list of my own weeks the way Rita made lists of supplies, and together we walked it: shifts, sleep, the store downstairs with its bell on the door, Esther two blocks over for emergencies, the Beemans three miles out for everything else. "You see it?" Kate said. "It isn't a plea anymore. It's a schedule. Schedules are what courts can hold."
Hannah Doyle came for the home study on a Tuesday, clipboard in hand, and walked my two rooms with the eyes of a woman who has seen every version of a family's story and learned to read the real one in the details. She checked the smoke alarms and the water heater. She noted the secondhand couch, the thrift store lamp, the little desk in the corner with a boy's name already on it in my mind if not yet on the wood. She opened the refrigerator — soup, milk, eggs, a bag of apples — and wrote something down, and I never did learn whether the apples counted for me or were just apples.
"You keep a clean house, Wren," she said at the door, and then, like it cost her a small professional effort to say anything warmer than the form allowed, "You keep a ready one. There's a difference. The court should see it."
I filed her report in the folder with everything else, and I waited, which by then I had some practice at.
After that I prepared the way I'd been taught to prepare for weather: early, and without trusting it. Rita drilled me at the register between customers — "What will you say when the judge asks about the night shifts?" — and made me answer out loud until the answer sounded like a fact instead of an apology: Esther on call, the Beemans on standby, a boy old enough to telephone three numbers by heart. Carol called one night after Micah was asleep and said, "We've told Hannah the truth, Wren. All of it. Including that he asks for you in his sleep sometimes, and we won't be the people who stand between a boy and that." I thanked her with a voice that behaved. Then I sat a long time in the ready little kitchen, among the ticked boxes and the labeled shelves, being looked after by my own preparations.
The hearing date came by mail, in an envelope so plain I almost threw it in with the thrift store circulars. Six weeks out. A Tuesday, at nine in the morning, in front of Judge Voss, who would decide whether my brother came home to a two-room apartment over a charity shop or stayed a foster child with a sister who visited on Sundays.
I stood in the kitchen holding that letter for a long time. All my life, the future had been a rumor — weather coming over the mountains, a thing you braced for but never scheduled. Now it had a date on it. A date can be circled. A date can be counted down to, like a storm in reverse: not the day something breaks, but the day something might finally hold.
I was more afraid of that letter than I had ever been of the storm, and I had been plenty afraid of the storm. Fear of losing is ordinary; everybody I know is fluent in it. Fear of being handed the thing you've begged for, with a judge watching to see what you do with it — that was a new language, and I had six weeks to learn it in.
I put the date on the thrift store calendar in red marker, where Rita could see it and be pleased. Then I went back to the register, because the pay stubs were the court's language, and I intended to be fluent by Tuesday, nine o'clock, six weeks out.