Chapter 21: The Ninety Days
People kept calling it a countdown, like I was waiting for something to explode. Ninety days of emergency guardianship, and then a judge would decide whether I got to keep raising my own brother. It didn't feel like a countdown. It felt like a garden. You don't stand over a garden with a stopwatch. You just show up every morning and do the next small thing.
The first small thing was school. I enrolled Micah at Coldwater Creek Middle School with a folder of paperwork so thick the secretary, Mrs. Pruitt, weighed it in her hands like produce. Birth certificate. Immunization record. The court order. Micah stood beside me twisting the strap of his backpack and said, "Do I have to tell people why I live with my sister?" I said, "You have to tell people your locker combination if you forget it. Everything else is yours." He thought about that and nodded like I'd handed him something with weight.
Hannah Doyle came every week at first. She'd sit at our little kitchen table with her clipboard and ask her questions, and Micah would answer them the way he answers everything, sideways and true. Are you eating enough? "Wren makes spaghetti on Tuesdays. It's a law now." Do you feel safe here? "The lock sticks. Wren says a sticking lock is a lock with a personality." Hannah wrote that one down. I watched her write it and tried not to feel like a student whose teacher was grading in red pen. She wasn't. I know that now. But in September I still flinched at clipboards.
The thrift store became the second classroom. The apartment is right above it, so after school Micah would come down the back stairs and set up at the end of the counter with his math book and a pencil chewed to a splinter. Customers thought he was the store's mascot. He did long division between the register and the rack of winter coats, and when he got stuck he'd hold the book up without a word and I'd work it out on a price tag. Mrs. Alvarado, who runs the register on Thursdays, started bringing him cinnamon toast in a napkin and calling it tuition.
Homework was the easy part. The hard parts were stupid and small, which is how you know they're the real parts. A permission slip that said parent or guardian, and my hand shaking over which box to check. A nightmare in October where Micah woke up calling for Dad and I sat on the floor by his bed until his breathing slowed, and neither of us said anything in the morning. The electric bill. Always the electric bill, arriving like it had a grudge.
Kate Brennan filed the expungement motion in October. My arrest record — the charge dismissed with prejudice — still followed me around in databases like a dog that doesn't know its owner moved. Kate stood in front of the judge with a folder thinner than my school one. "The state does not oppose," the prosecutor said, and that was that. Nineteen years old and I had to be legally handed back my own clean name. I didn't cry in the courtroom. I cried in Kate's car, in the parking lot, for about ninety seconds, and then she handed me a gas station napkin and said, "That's the last paperwork on you, Wren. From here it's just paperwork for you."
Hannah's visits thinned out into coffee. By November she was coming every other week, then once with no clipboard at all, just a paper cup from the gas station and questions about the store's Christmas window. "This is the last official one," she said, "unless you count the hearing." I said, "I count everything. It's a family trait."
The hearing was the first week of December. Snow had come early and stayed. Kate wore a red scarf. The judge — a different judge than the spring, a woman with reading glasses on a chain — read Hannah's report for a long time, and the radiator ticked, and Micah sat very straight in a shirt the Beemans had bought him, with his hands folded like a tiny defendant in a painting. "Ms. Halloway," the judge said, "the court is confirming full guardianship of Micah Halloway to his sister, Wren Halloway, effective today, with the court's thanks for a model review period." Model. I have been called a lot of things by courts. That one I'm keeping.
She slid the papers across. My pen had died in my purse somewhere between the parking lot and the metal detector. The bailiff, a big quiet man named Roy, reached into his own pocket without a word and handed me his. Of course he did. I signed my name with a borrowed pen, in a warm courtroom, while the snow came down over Coldwater Creek, and Micah Halloway became, in the eyes of every database in Montana, my boy to raise.