Dale went five years under my roof without once raising his voice at my granddaughter.
Then a man in a club vest got up out of the next booth at breakfast and asked her if she was DOING ALRIGHT.
Bailey looked up at him and answered with one word.
Nuh-uh.
Nineteen years I’ve been reading grown men across a booking counter at the county jail, and I couldn’t read my own breakfast table.
Saturdays, the three of us split biscuits and gravy at the Skillet out on Highway 50. That hour is the only one in my week that doesn’t smell like the jail.
Lorraine had my sweet tea on the table before I sat down. “Regular, Jo?” she said.
Bailey is nine, and she’s been mine on paper since she was three. She turns every placemat into a word search and slides it across for Dale to solve.
Dale and I married the spring she turned four. He taught her to cast a line off the dock at the lake.
That Saturday he reached across her for the hot sauce, and Bailey jerked her arm in so hard her chocolate milk went over.
I told her to mind her elbows. She stared at the puddle.
I put it down to the sleepover the night before.
Somebody in the booth at my back laid his fork down. Heavy guy, gray beard, a club patch on his leather vest from nowhere around here, and his was the ONLY bike in the gravel lot.
He got down on one knee beside Bailey’s chair. “Hey, sweet pea. Everything good with you?”
She shook her head first, and then she said it to his face. Nuh-uh.
“Lord, Jo, she’s fine. KNOCK IT OFF,” Dale said, and laughed like the man had told a joke.
The biker didn’t get up right away. He looked at Dale a good long while, and then he went back to his booth.
I knocked it off.
Bedtime, I sat on the edge of her mattress and asked what was the matter. Her tummy hurt, she said, and she rolled to face the wall.
Within a week she’d quit going into the living room whenever Dale was home and I WASN’T.
Growing pains, I figured.
Then I charged up the old tablet in my nightstand to play solitaire, and the pet camera from when we still had the beagle was signed in. The camera itself sat on the living room bookshelf, and nobody had ever unplugged it.
I went back through the recordings to the week I’d picked up OVERNIGHTS for a girl out on maternity leave.
My legs went.
Dale was bent down by the couch with a fistful of the back of Bailey’s sweatshirt, his mouth right at her ear.
“BREATHE IT TO GRANDMA AND THE JUDGE TAKES YOU AWAY FROM HER. THAT JUDGE OWES ME.”
I didn’t say a word to him. I fried his eggs the next morning same as always and started pulling his personnel file from the years he drove transport for the jail.
Then I phoned the Skillet. Lorraine never got the biker’s name, but his sister’s number was on a card she’d tucked by the register.
A woman picked up on the second ring.
“This’d be Bailey’s grandma,” she said. “Whatever you’re planning for Dale, I need to talk to you FIRST.”
The staff lot, ten-forty
I was in my car behind the jail with twelve minutes left on my break and a pack of peanut butter crackers I hadn’t opened.
“Who am I talking to?” I said.
“Carol,” she said. “I was married to Dale seven years. The man who got down by her chair is my brother, Hank.”
Carol.
Dale had said that name maybe twice in five years. The rest of the time she was the ex, the one who lit out for Tennessee with his bass boat.
“I had a girl,” she said. “Amy. She was two when I married him.”
She let that sit.
“I need you to hold off calling anybody. The sheriff, a lawyer, that friend at work you’d trust with your life. Hold off on all of them till you’ve sat at my kitchen table and seen what’s in my closet.”
The clip was on the phone against my ear. I’d filmed the tablet screen with it at two in the morning, the way I photograph a monitor at work when the printer jams, and I hadn’t opened the folder since.
“I work at the jail,” I said. “I know who to call.”
“I know where you work, honey. I looked you up.”
I pulled a commissary slip out of my shirt pocket and wrote her address on the back in block capitals, so nobody could misread it later. Same as a next-of-kin number on an intake sheet.
An hour north. A town I’d only ever driven through for funerals.
“Not this Saturday,” I said. “Saturday’s the Skillet, and Dale would notice an empty booth. A week from Saturday.”
“Hank’ll keep her busy out front if you want to bring her.”
My break was up. I had my hand on the door handle.
Then she asked one more thing, and I took my hand off the door.
“Stan Kemper still sign her papers?”
Kemper’s peppermint dish
Bailey’s papers went through the spring she was three, in courtroom two on the second floor of the courthouse, with my daughter Tina somewhere in Joplin and not answering her phone.
Judge Kemper read the file in about the time it takes me to book a shoplifter. Then he looked down over his glasses at Bailey in my lap and pushed a glass dish of peppermints to the edge of the bench.
“Take one for the road, young lady,” he said.
He did it at every review after that, one each fall. A few questions for me, a signature, a peppermint, about ten minutes start to finish.
Dale came to the second review. We’d been married since spring. He wore a pressed shirt and sat in the front row right behind Bailey with his cap on his knee, and when Kemper looked up from the file his whole face changed.
“Dale,” he said. “Been a while.”
“Judge,” Dale said.
Riding home after, Bailey had the peppermint going in her cheek and Dale had his arm out the window.
“Stan and I go back,” he said. “I drove transport for the county when he was still prosecuting. Earl and me, twelve years in that van.”
I liked hearing that. I’ve spent my working life watching what a first name can do in a building like ours, and I figured a man the judge called Dale was one more wall between Bailey and anybody who came for her.
I’d married a quiet man on purpose. My first husband yelled, and so did my father, and Tina grew up in a house where you could hear a cupboard door from the mailbox.
Dale never yelled. He fixed the porch step and the garbage disposal. He took Bailey out to the lake on his days off and taught her to cast off the dock, and I took a picture of the two of them holding up a bluegill the size of her palm and put it on Facebook.
Bailey made me post every Saturday after that. Our booth at the Skillet, three plates, and she’d hang over my shoulder till I typed it. Saturday biscuits with my two. Then the little pin that tells the whole world where you’re sitting.
Forty-some people liked every one of those. Nearly all of them worked at the jail.
Earl Pomeroy never missed one. He’d moved down to the records room when his knees went, and he kept the basement now, where the old booking ledgers sit on steel shelves from before we went to computers. I trained on those books my first year. Transport initialed every line they carried in.
And then there was Vogel.
Vogel is a state police investigator who walks a child’s case past my counter maybe twice a year. She has never once sat in the chair I offer her. She stands at the end of my counter with her coffee and reads every page before she signs.
I’d had my thumb on her number at three that morning.
Then Carol said Kemper’s name.
I went back inside nine minutes late, and my sergeant tapped his watch at me. I took the stairs down to the basement instead of going to the counter, and Earl Pomeroy slid his window open.
Earl Pomeroy’s window
Earl had the file waiting with a rubber band around it. He didn’t hand it through.
“Pension paperwork,” I said.
“Dale’s pension’s been squared away since oh-six.” He turned the folder a quarter turn on the counter with one finger. “He know you’re down here?”
“I’m surprising him,” I said.
He had a picture of a walleye taped to the side of his monitor, curling at the corners. He looked at it a while.
Then he gave me the file.
It was thin. A hire date in 1994. A pair of commendation letters for driving through the ice storm of ’97. A certificate from a defensive driving class.
And a written reprimand, dated March 2004.
Unauthorized route deviation. Unit 3 arrived at facility without prisoner of record. Thirty-eight minutes unaccounted for. Signed by a captain I knew only from the plaque by the elevator. Driver, D. Hutchens. Second officer, E. Pomeroy.
Nineteen years at that counter, I’ve had the van doors open on nobody three times. Each time, somebody’s paperwork died on the road between the arrest and me, and somebody upstairs had made a phone call.
Earl was watching me read.
“Ancient history,” he said. “We all got wrote up once or twice. Dale’s been good to you, Jo. And to that little girl.”
He put both hands flat on the counter.
“Leave old paper alone,” he said.
I tucked the file under my arm and told him I’d have it back by end of shift.
I was halfway up the stairs when his window scraped shut, and then it scraped open again.
“Jo,” he said. “Say hey to Dale for me.”
Ledger book, 2004
Earl eats lunch at noon at the Hardee’s across the highway, the same as when he drove. I went back down the next Monday at ten after twelve with the basement key booking keeps on a nail behind the counter.
The ledgers are green and clothbound, a year to a book, and they smell like the inside of a filing cabinet. 2004 was on the third shelf.
I opened it to March and ran my finger down the dates. I’ve run that finger down ten thousand lines in my own handwriting.
The night of the reprimand had nine bookings. A bar fight, a pair of warrants, a woman who’d bit a deputy, four DWIs off the river road.
The ninth had a line drawn through it with a ruler.
KEMPER, MITCHELL R. Age 19. DWI. Transport, Unit 3.
Stan Kemper was the county prosecutor in 2004. His name sat on the bottom of every charging paper I handled my first two years. Mitch Kemper sells crop insurance out of an office on the square now, and he sits on the hospital board, and I’ve bought raffle tickets from his wife.
Past the end of the crossed-out line, in Dale’s square printing, it said VOID. RELEASED AT SCENE. D.H.
I stood there long enough for the motion light to click off on me. I had to wave my arm to bring it back.
The copier down there logs your badge number on every page it makes. The whole building knows it, because the sheriff taped a sign over it after somebody ran off two hundred flyers for a church fish fry.
I punched in mine and copied the page anyway.
When I lifted the book off the glass, the margin had something else in it, small, in blue ink that wasn’t Dale’s.
per S.K.
The bookshelf
That Tuesday I came home off a day shift. I’d quit taking overnights. My sergeant said it left him short, and I said I knew it did.
Dale had catfish going in the cast-iron pan and the ball game on the radio. He kissed my cheek. He smelled like the lake.
Bailey sat at the table with a paper placemat she’d brought home from the Skillet, drawing a word search on the back. She didn’t slide it across to him.
I went to put my bag down in the living room, and the bookshelf was wrong.
The camera was gone. The cord was wound in a neat coil next to our wedding picture, the way Dale coils a stringer.
The tablet was still in my nightstand, plugged in where I’d left it. The app asked for a password. When I typed it in, the screen said the account didn’t exist.
I locked myself in the bathroom and opened that folder on my phone for the first time in five days. The clip was still on it. Forty-one seconds.
Dale talked through supper about the bluegill bedding off the point and passed me the tartar sauce.
Then, around a mouthful, “Earl says you were in the basement again.”
“Pension paperwork,” I said.
“Earl said you’d say that.”
He wiped his fingers on his napkin one at a time.
“Ran into Stan at the Elks. Bailey’s review is the nineteenth. He asked me how she’s doing. I always tell him.”
Bailey laid her fork down and looked at her lap.
“I’ll be there,” Dale said. “Like always. Front row.”
That night I told Bailey she could sleep in Grandma’s bed. Dale said that was fine, he’d take the couch, his back liked it better anyhow.
I lay there with her breath on my arm and my phone under the pillow.
His socks came down the hall at ten after twelve and stopped outside my door.
Carol’s kitchen
He stood there about as long as it takes to drink a glass of water. Then the couch springs.
Saturday I told him Bailey and I were going to the outlet mall. He said he’d drive. I said girls only, and he laughed and said Lord, Jo, and let us go.
Carol’s was a white ranch house with a wooden ramp built onto the front for a mother who’d passed in the spring. The bike from the Skillet lot sat in the carport.
Hank came out in a T-shirt, no vest, and he stopped at the bottom of the ramp.
“Ma’am,” he said. Then, to Bailey, “I’ve got a gas tank that needs a tic-tac-toe champion.”
She looked up at me. I looked at him a while, the way I look at a man across the counter before I decide which cell he goes in. Then I nodded, and the two of them played in the road dust on his tank with their fingers, right where I could see them from Carol’s kitchen window.
Carol was smaller than her voice, sixty or near it, with reading glasses on a beaded chain. A feed store calendar on her wall was two years behind and open to a picture of a Hereford.
She set a shoebox on the table.
The first thing out of it was my own Facebook post, printed on plain paper. Dale and Bailey on the dock with the bluegill. The pin for the Skillet on Highway 50.
“Amy saw that on her phone on her lunch break,” Carol said. “Amy is twenty-three now. She knew his cap before she knew his face. She went out and sat in her car an hour.”
“Hank rode up from Knoxville the next week,” she said. “He ate at that diner three Saturdays running. He told me if your girl looked fine to him, he’d ride home and keep his mouth shut.”
I’d had my back to him for three Saturdays.
The second thing out of the box was a court paper with the county seal on it. Carol’s name on the top line, Dale’s under it, Amy’s under that, and a date in 2011.
The box at the bottom said DENIED. The signature under it was the same one on Bailey’s papers.
“Amy told me one thing,” Carol said. “The judge would take her away from me if she ever told.”
I put the ledger copy on the table beside it. She read it twice and put her fingernail on per S.K.
“I wondered seven years what Dale had on him,” she said.
Bailey had Hank beat out in the carport. She was laughing with her whole face.
“He never yelled at Amy either,” Carol said. “He never had to.”
She took her glasses off and let them drop on the chain.
“Kemper called her up by the bench at my hearing. He asked her one question. Whether she liked living with Dale.”
“She said yes,” Carol said. “Dale was sitting right behind her.”
Courtroom two, the nineteenth
I drove the clip to the state police post that same night, with Bailey asleep in the back seat under my jacket. Vogel played it twice standing up.
Then she sat down.
“Monday,” she said. “I’ll be in the back row. Keep her away from him till then.”
We stayed at Carol’s through Sunday. I texted Dale that the outlet mall had turned into a girls’ weekend at a motel with a pool. He sent back a thumbs-up.
Hank was on Carol’s porch half of Saturday night with his phone. He never told me how many he’d called.
ELEVEN motorcycles sat in a row on the courthouse back lot at twenty to nine on the nineteenth, backed against the curb with every front wheel pointed at the street.
The men were upstairs, along both walls of the second-floor hallway, with a lane down the middle about as wide as a grandmother and a girl. They had their vests buttoned and their caps off. The youngest of them held the stairwell door for the clerk.
Bailey walked that lane with her hand in mine and a folded placemat in her jacket pocket. Hank stood at the end, by the courtroom door. He nodded to her. She nodded back.
Carol sat on the bench across from him with her purse on her knees.
Dale came up the stairs at five till, pressed shirt, cap in his hand. He stopped at the top and took in the vests and the woman on the bench.
Then he smiled at me like I’d told a joke.
“Lord, Jo. Somebody die?”
The men along the wall didn’t answer.
“Carol,” he said. “Long way from Tennessee.”
He came down the lane slow and talked the whole way. He wasn’t loud. Dale is never loud.
“Earl had you figured. He called me the day you went in that basement. I stopped by the sheriff’s this morning before I came over, Jo. He pulled the log off that copier. Got your badge number and the minute you punched it. Jo, you’re done out there.”
He was close enough now that I could smell the lake on him.
“Nineteen years,” he said. “Gone over a piece of paper older than the girl.”
I had eight months to go to twenty.
“And when Stan asks this one who she wants to live with,” he said, “she knows what to say. Right, sweet pea?”
He went down on one knee in front of her, like Hank had at the Skillet, and his hand came out for the back of her jacket.
Bailey stepped behind my leg.
“Nuh-uh,” she said.
Hank came off the wall. He didn’t touch Dale. He put himself where Dale’s hand had been headed, and he stayed there.
The clerk opened the courtroom door and called Bailey’s name.
Kemper was on the bench with the peppermint dish at his elbow. He looked up. “Dale,” he said, like every fall, and Dale took the front row.
I didn’t sit. I walked the folder up to the clerk and asked her to hand it to the judge.
Kemper read it fast. Then he read it again slow. He took his glasses off.
The room had eleven bikers in it, a state trooper, his clerk, Carol, Dale, Bailey and me.
“Mrs. Brandt,” he said. “This file goes across the county line this afternoon. I won’t be hearing it.”
“Stan,” Dale said.
Kemper moved the peppermint dish to the far side of the bench. “Sit down, Mr. Hutchens.”
Dale got up out of the front row instead.
“I carried your boy into his own house in oh-four with puke on his shoes,” he said. “I carried him up the stairs, Stan. I never said one word to a soul. And you’re going to let a jailer and a busload of—” He looked at the men along the wall. “Stan, you owe me.”
Kemper didn’t look at him.
Vogel stood up in the back row.
“Mr. Hutchens,” she said. “I need you out in the hall.”
He picked his cap up off the front row and put it on, indoors, in front of the judge.
Hank held the door, and Dale walked through it without looking at Bailey.
Biscuits for two
The first Saturday in December, Bailey and I took our booth at the Skillet. Biscuits and gravy, split two ways.
Lorraine had my sweet tea down before I sat. She set a chocolate milk by Bailey with a lid on it and didn’t say a word about why.
“Regular, Jo?” she said.
I ring up feed and fence staples now at the farm store a mile down 50, and I come home smelling like molasses. The county’s letter about my retirement is on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a bass, with the page that has the number folded under.
A judge two counties over signed Bailey’s papers in a room with no candy dish. She asked Bailey what she was reading and wrote the answer down.
The girl who took my shift booked Dale in on a Tuesday. She called that night to tell me he asked for me at the counter.
Hank rode home to Knoxville the week after. He calls on Sundays and plays tic-tac-toe with Bailey over the phone, which can’t be done, and she tells him so every time.
She watches cartoons in the living room again, feet up on the coffee table. The spot on the bookshelf is still empty.
I don’t post from the Skillet anymore.
Bailey finished her biscuit, pulled a placemat out of her jacket, and slid it across the table to me. She had made the word search on the back in purple pen, the letters crowded clear to the edges.
“Find HANK first,” she said. “I put him in upside down.”
Pass this one to somebody who’d notice when a kid goes quiet at the breakfast table.
If you’re enjoying these tales, you might also like The Rider Had the Board Member Who Signs My Contract on the Ice Chest, or perhaps My Husband Said One More Plate Would Cost Me My Dispatch Job and The Last Girl I Walked Into Room B Never Said a Word.
