My wife called me from the family services lot at four in the afternoon and said one word twice, and the second time it came out FLAT.
GONE.
We had been somebody’s parents for nine weeks, and eleven motorcycles were idling behind her while she said it.
“Don’t get off the bikes,” she said to them, and then, to me, “Come now.”
Loretta had kept a list of names in her phone for eleven years before we ever filled out a form. She smiled at every shower invitation and cried in the truck afterward with the radio turned up.
The doctors in Bledsoe County ran everything twice and then stopped offering us anything at all.
So we took the other road, the one with a waiting room and a case number.
Shanda was nineteen and wore her mother’s blazer to the meeting so she would look older than she was. She said she wanted her baby to have a room that stayed the same room.
We signed. She signed.
The agency stamped it the way a bank stamps a car loan.
The first weeks I slept four hours a night and walked around feeling like a rich man. Loretta barely slept at all and grinned through every three in the morning bottle.
We named her Winnie, after nobody.
My brother’s club came down our street that first weekend just to blow their horns at a baby — ELEVEN of them, Buford out front at fifty-eight, waving with two fingers.
He leaned over the tank and said, “Merle, she’s got your worried face already.”
Then a Tuesday came and the house was empty when I got home.
Her car was sitting in the family services lot with the driver door open and the blanket folded on the seat.
She was on the curb with a green folder across her knees.
“She’s NOT OURS as of this morning,” Loretta said.
Buford cut his engine, and then the other ten did.
Nobody spoke.
The woman inside had shut the blinds on the second window, and Loretta kept looking at that window instead of at me.
“She wouldn’t give me a name,” Loretta said. “She said READ IT FIRST.”
I took the folder off her knees.
The clasp was already open.
The first page had our last name on it and a date NINE weeks old. The second page had a name on it I had never heard in my life.
I turned to the third page while she watched my hands.
The third page
In the Matter of the Adoption of a Minor Child, Bledsoe County. Then a line of small type, and then a sentence with a verb in it that made my hands go cold in the sun.
Petition to vacate final decree of adoption, brought by Dorsey Kubiak, maternal grandmother, on grounds that petitioner received no notice of the proceeding as required.
Under it, a date stamped that morning. Under that, a line for a judge who had not signed yet.
I read it twice standing up. The second time I sat down on the curb next to my wife because my legs did that on their own.
“Nobody’s signed this,” I said.
“They don’t have to sign it for her to be inside that building,” Loretta said.
I looked at the door.
“She’s inside,” Loretta said. “They let me hold her for four minutes.”
I got up and went to the door and it was locked, four-oh-nine in the afternoon, and there was a piece of paper taped inside the glass with office hours on it that ended at four.
Behind me eleven engines stayed off. That is a sound too, eleven engines not running.
I put my hand flat on the glass, which did nothing, and looked at the blinds on the second window, and one of the slats was bent down about an inch.
Somebody in there was watching us and had been the whole time.
“Loretta,” I said. “Who is Dorsey Kubiak?”
She said, “Shanda never mentioned a mother.”
The blazer
In March, Shanda sat across a laminate table from us in a blazer that was two sizes too big in the shoulders and rolled at the wrists.
She kept putting her hands in the sleeves and pulling them back out.
She was five months along and she had a bus schedule folded in the pocket. She had come from a shift at the Casey’s on Route 6 and she smelled like the fryer.
Loretta had rehearsed a speech in the truck and did not use one word of it. She asked Shanda if she wanted coffee.
Shanda said she wanted to know if we would move.
“Move where,” I said.
“Anywhere,” she said. “People move. I lived in six places before I was ten and every one of them somebody said was permanent.”
I told her about the house. Two bedrooms, one bad window, a yard with a stump in it I had been meaning to grind for four years. I told her about the rail yard and second shift and how I would be home at three-forty every afternoon and how that was not going to change because I had eleven years in and no ambition.
She laughed at that. Nineteen and she laughed at a man saying he had no ambition.
Loretta showed her the list. Eleven years of names in a phone, scrolled slow. Shanda read all of it and stopped at Winnie and said that was a grandmother name.
“It is,” Loretta said. “It was nobody’s. I just liked it.”
I want to say what the list was, because a stranger would look at it and see a sad thing. It was not sad. It was eleven years of a woman refusing to stop expecting.
We had tried the medical road until a man in Bledsoe County with a good haircut told us there was nothing further indicated. That is the phrase. Nothing further indicated. He said it like a bus route ending.
Loretta cried in the parking garage for eleven minutes and then said, out loud, to the concrete, “Fine. Then the other way.”
So: a waiting room. A case number. Eighty-one pages. A woman named Junette Pruitt who came to our house twice and opened our cupboards and asked where the medications were kept, and wrote things on a clipboard, and told us on the second visit that our stump in the yard was going to have to go.
I ground the stump that weekend.
At the March meeting, near the end, Shanda asked us one more thing.
She asked if there would be other people. Grandparents, aunts, a lot of them, at Christmas.
Loretta said her folks were gone and mine were gone but there was my brother and his crowd, and they were loud and they came around, and they were not blood but they showed up.
Shanda thought about that.
Then she pulled her hands back into the blazer sleeves.
Shanda said, “My mom’s not in it. That’s why I picked you.”
Junette Pruitt
She came out at ten past eight the next morning and unlocked the door from the inside and did not look surprised to see my truck already in the lot.
I had slept in it. Loretta had gone home at midnight because somebody had to be at a house that had a crib in it.
Pruitt held the door with her foot. “Mr. Tarkington.”
“Where is she.”
“She’s in emergency placement with a licensed family. She ate at six and again at four this morning and she’s fine, and that is every single thing I’m allowed to say about it, and I’m saying more than I should.”
I asked her what a grandmother had to do with anything.
Pruitt let the door close behind her and stood on the step instead of going in. That is when I knew she was going to talk to me.
“An adoption decree can be vacated for defect in notice,” she said. “It’s rare. A blood relative in the same county who says she was never served — a judge has to at least look at it.”
“Was she served?”
“The file says the box was ticked.”
“Ticked by who?”
Pruitt looked at the lot. Eleven bikes had gone home at eleven the night before because I made them, and now there was one, Buford’s, parked at the far end with him sitting on it eating a gas station sandwich like a man with nowhere to be.
“That box wasn’t hers to tick,” Pruitt said. “It was ours.”
The Casey’s on Route 6
I drove out there at noon because Shanda’s phone rang four times and then stopped ringing at all, which is a phone that has been shut off, not a phone somebody is ignoring.
The manager was a kid of maybe twenty-four with a lanyard.
He said Shanda quit three weeks ago. No notice. Left a hat and an apron in the back and never came for her last check, which was still in an envelope in the drawer under the register, and he showed me, because I asked, and because I looked like a man who had not slept.
Two hundred and eleven dollars.
“She say where she was going?”
“She said her mom got her a job,” he said. “She didn’t seem happy about it. She said it like somebody telling you they got jury duty.”
I stood in that parking lot with the pumps behind me and did the arithmetic. Three weeks ago Shanda’s mother appeared in her life with a job. Yesterday morning her mother filed a petition. Somewhere in that there was a room where the two of them sat down and had a conversation, and it was not about Winnie’s room staying the same room.
I called a lawyer from the truck. A man named Grady Ostrander whose name Pruitt would not give me but whose ad is on the back of the Bledsoe County phone book, which is how a person finds a lawyer at noon on a Wednesday.
He listened for six minutes and then he told me the number.
Sixty-two hundred to retain, and that was to start, and that was not a trial, and a contested vacate with a blood relative could run three times that and take fourteen months.
I have eleven years at the rail yard and a truck with a hundred and ninety thousand on it. I have four thousand one hundred dollars and a house with eighteen years left on it.
“What happens if I don’t retain you,” I said.
“Then a woman with a lawyer stands in front of a judge and you stand there without one,” Ostrander said. “And you say true things badly.”
Second shift
I did not go home the short way. I went down Route 6 past the Casey’s again and past the grade crossing where the rails cut the road, and I sat at that crossing while nothing came, both directions, for a long time.
I got home at three-forty out of pure habit.
Loretta was on the floor of Winnie’s room with her back against the crib, and she had not taken the sheet off, and she had not put it in the wash, because that is what the sheet smelled like.
She said, “Say the number.”
I said the number.
She got up and went and got the phone with eleven years of names in it and she sat down at the kitchen table and started calling people about a truck. But how do you buy your own daughter back from a woman you have never met?
The grade crossing
It was in the folder the whole time.
Not on the third page. On the back of it, in the footer, in six-point type, the way a printer puts a case caption on every sheet of a filing so nobody separates them.
Ref: In re Estate of B. R. Fenske, Bledsoe Co. Probate No. 25-P-118.
I had read that folder maybe forty times in two days and I read the footer the way you read the fine print on a receipt, which is not at all, until Thursday night at the table when Loretta was on the phone with a man about the truck and I had nothing to do with my hands.
I typed it into my phone.
Bledsoe County probate is public. It took eleven minutes.
Brandon Fenske, twenty-two, of Route 6, killed at the grade crossing in January of this year when a car he was a passenger in went around the arms. Settlement with the railroad’s insurer, approved and deposited into the court’s registry in late August.
One heir. Minor child, born in Bledsoe County.
Born in Bledsoe County in July.
I sat there with the phone in my hand and everything reorganized itself, quiet, like a shelf being straightened.
Winnie has a father. Had one. He died six months before she was born and nobody at that laminate table in March said his name, and I never asked, because you do not ask a nineteen-year-old that in a room with an agency stamp in it.
The money went into the court’s registry in late August.
A minor’s settlement sits there until somebody with legal standing petitions to be the guardian of the estate. A parent. Or, if there is no parent — if a girl signed her rights away in March — the nearest blood relative willing to file.
I looked up the petition date on our vacate.
Eleven days after the deposit.
And then I got up and went to the closet where Loretta had hung the blazer, because Shanda had left it at our house in March, on a chair, and had never come back for it, and Loretta could not throw away anything belonging to that girl.
It is a woman’s blazer, size fourteen, from a store in Peoria.
Inside the breast pocket there is a folded receipt and a hair elastic and a laminated card, and the card is a Bledsoe County visitor badge, expired, with a date on it in March, two days before our meeting.
Name printed on it: KUBIAK, D.
The blazer was hers. She had been in that room before Shanda ever sat down.
Eleven engines, not running
The hearing was in courtroom two on a Monday at nine, and by eight-forty there were eleven motorcycles along the wall of the lot, and eleven men and women standing beside them in daylight not doing one single thing.
Buford had asked me the night before what I wanted, and I told him.
I said, don’t come inside. Don’t fill the hallway. Don’t be a wall of leather behind my chair, because a judge sees that and sees a threat, and the person with legal standing in this room is not me.
Just be in the lot. Cut the engines when I go in.
He said, “That’s the whole ask?”
I said it was.
Dorsey Kubiak was forty-four and wore a gray suit and a bracelet she turned around her wrist. She had a lawyer from Peoria in a better suit. I had Grady Ostrander, retained with thirty-one hundred dollars down, which is what a truck with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it is worth to a man who buys them for parts. He carried the rest of the sixty-two hundred on paper when I told him the four thousand one hundred in savings was eighteen years of house payments and I was not going to be the man who lost the house and the girl both.
Loretta sat behind me with the blazer folded on her lap like a coat at church.
Dorsey talked for nineteen minutes.
She talked about not being told. She talked about a daughter who was nineteen and vulnerable and pressured. She talked about a family that had had hard years and was on its feet now and about a room she had painted. She said the word blood four times and the word Winnie zero.
Her lawyer put in the notice statute. He put in a case from 2011. He said the decree was void on its face and asked for it vacated and for temporary placement with his client pending a full guardianship.
Then he said, and this is the part where I felt Loretta’s hand come down on my shoulder from behind, that his client would also be petitioning as guardian of the minor’s estate in the related probate matter, as the natural person to do so.
Ostrander stood up and said we had two exhibits.
He put in the visitor badge.
Dorsey said she had been at family services in March about her own matter, unrelated, a benefits question.
Ostrander put in the probate docket, the deposit date in late August, and the file stamp on her petition eleven days later.
Dorsey’s lawyer said the timing proved nothing and that his client was entitled to protect a child’s assets.
The judge, a woman about sixty with reading glasses she took off to talk, said, “Counsel, I’m going to hear from Mr. Tarkington, and then I’m going to take a recess, because I have a notice problem in front of me that I don’t like at all.”
I stood up.
I had written four pages on the back of a rail yard inspection sheet and I did not use them.
I said, “The notice thing is real. I don’t like it either. Somebody in that office ticked a box and I’ve been mad about it for two weeks, and if a judge tells me my daughter’s adoption has a hole in it, then it has a hole in it, and I’m not going to stand here and say it doesn’t.”
Dorsey’s lawyer sat forward.
“So fix the hole,” I said. “Serve her. Do it right. Do the whole thing over with everybody in the room. I’ll sit through it. I’ll pay for it, somehow.”
The judge said, “And the estate, Mr. Tarkington?”
“That’s the part I came to say.”
I turned around and looked at Dorsey Kubiak, and she turned the bracelet on her wrist.
“There’s a settlement in your court from a boy who died at a crossing on Route 6,” I said. “That’s Winnie’s. Every dollar. I don’t want it. I’ve never wanted it. I didn’t know it existed until Thursday.”
I said I would sign anything, right there, in front of them, waiving any claim by me or my wife or our estate, forever. I said put it in a trust with a bank as trustee and not one human being on it who has a last name in this room, and lock it until she is twenty-five, and let her buy a house with it or blow it on nothing, and let the bank send her a statement once a year with my name nowhere on it.
I said the fees for setting it up could come out of it. I said the grandmother could have visitation and I would drive.
Then I said the last thing, looking right at her.
“Take the money. I’ll take the girl.”
Dorsey Kubiak looked at her lawyer.
Her lawyer looked at his legal pad and did not write anything on it.
And that is how a room tells you what it was ever about.
The doors at the back of courtroom two are the kind on a spring, and they came open with a sound, and everybody turned.
Shanda Kubiak stood in the doorway in a hooded sweatshirt with a Casey’s name tag still clipped to it from a different Casey’s in a different county, holding her phone in both hands.
The judge said, “Ma’am, are you a party to this?”
Shanda said, “I’m the mother. The one that signed. Nobody told me there was money either.”
Dorsey said her name once, low, the way you say a dog’s name in a house with company in it.
Shanda did not look at her.
She looked at Loretta, in the second row, with a blazer folded on her lap.
Then she said to the judge, “Can I say what I want, or does she talk for me here too?”
The green edge
Six weeks later, a Saturday, and the blanket is back on the passenger seat of Loretta’s car where it lives, cream with the pale green edge, because Winnie will not sleep in a car without it and we are done fighting that.
The decree got vacated and re-entered on the eleventh of the month with everybody properly served, which took nine minutes and cost fourteen hundred dollars.
There is a bank in Peoria that is trustee of a trust with a number instead of a name. The first statement comes in April.
Dorsey Kubiak gets the second Sunday of the month, at a McDonald’s with a play structure, and I drive, and I sit in the truck in the lot with the radio on, and she has come twice out of six.
Shanda came four out of six. She comes on the bus.
The green folder went in the burn barrel behind the shed the week the truck sold, and I stood there and watched the clasp go orange and stay in the ash after everything else was gone. I fished it out with a rake. It is in the junk drawer. I do not know why.
I bought a Ranger with two hundred and forty thousand on it. It starts.
Buford’s crowd comes down the street on the first weekend of the month now, which somebody decided without telling me, and today they are early and Loretta hears them before I do because she is out front with Winnie on her hip.
Ten engines, then eleven, then they cut them one at a time down the block.
Buford rolls up last and puts his boot down and lifts two fingers off the bar.
Loretta said, “Turn her around so he can see her face.”
If this one sat on your chest a little, send it to somebody who has spent years waiting on a phone call that never comes.
For more tales that will keep you on the edge of your seat, check out The Man at Table Nine Had a Name Nobody Was Supposed to Hear, or perhaps My Niece Whispered a Secret in the School Pickup Line and My Daughter Asked Why Uncle Dale Gets Sad When She Says No.
