Starter House(20)

Lex didn’t care about the house. He’d bought it with the money the old man gave him for the other house. Jeanne could have the house, but she couldn’t have Theo. The lawyer had to understand. “I want my baby,” he said.

“The court usually leaves a baby with the primary caregiver. Is that you?”

“Are you the court’s lawyer or my lawyer?”

“Yours, your lawyer. I can’t help you by making false promises. We can go for joint custody. That’s the best you’ll get. Sole custody, not a chance, unless there’s abuse and you can prove it. That gets very ugly, very fast. I’m not going to waste your money and your time fighting for something you’ll never get.”

Lex reached into the greasy envelope for the pictures he’d brought. There was Jeanne, with her gold-blond curls and her bright pink face that spread out onto her shoulders. Her cheeks were wider than her forehead, her neck wider than her cheeks, her chin a pink bump in the broad meat of her throat.

“She’s a lot younger than you,” the lawyer said.

“She’s twenty. She was always big.” Lex knew he wasn’t being clear. “I bring fruit and vegetables. She takes my money that I bring home and she eats cheeseburgers for breakfast, and she feeds my baby.” He brought out the second picture: Theo with her fluff of dandelion-seed hair, her laughing face. She wore a white lace dress. Her arms bulged out of the short sleeves, and her cheeks were round pads of fat.

“Your wife’s unfit because she feeds the baby too much?”

“I need to take care of her.” That was as clear as he could be. It had to be enough.

The lawyer laid the pictures on his printer. “I’ll scan these into your file. We’ll depose the pediatrician. You need evidence. That means you need to be able to prove—”

“I know what evidence is.”

The lawyer gave him the pictures. “Mr. Hall, I’ll be honest with you. It’s a long shot. You’re calling it child abuse, the way your wife’s feeding Theo?”

Lex nodded hard. The lawyer was young, but he was quick. Child abuse.

“You’d have a better case if you’d filed on her.”

“I was going to.” And it was true, though he hadn’t known it until he heard himself saying it. “I told her, you keep feeding my baby cupcakes and corn dogs, I’ll take her and leave you. I told her, you can’t do that to my baby.”

“You said you didn’t want her to divorce you.”

“What I meant was, I wanted to go first and take Theo, because it’s not right. Jeanne was quicker than me is all.” It should have been true; it was as good as true.

The lawyer typed as Lex spoke. “Good. You get me Theo’s medical records, and I’ll get your custody hearing on the calendar.”

Lex stood up. “You’re a good lawyer,” he said. “You like avocados?”

“What I’d like is evidence good enough to make a family court judge take a ten-month-old baby away from her mother. If every chubby kid got taken into protective custody, we’d have to build a ranch the size of Texas to keep them in.”

“I can take more pictures. Better pictures.”

“Do that. I’ll get started on custody and visitation.”

The lawyer walked around the desk to shake Lex’s hand. People didn’t get close to Lex. Men, when they shook his hand, kept their arms straight to hold him off. Women crossed their arms when he came too close, and they never shook his hand at all. This was the first time a man who had a desk had walked around instead of reaching across. Lex let the hand drop—he was never sure how to stop shaking hands; was he supposed to pull away or let go or squeeze harder? There was a way to do it and he never found out how—and he backed out of the room.





Chapter Ten

ERIC WAS RIGHT, as he so often was. It made Lacey tired. One of these days he’d be wrong about something, and his head would explode. She laughed at the childish thought, though she was ashamed of it. He was the living twin of her teacher voice, an essential part of herself. He’d suggested she call the OB who’d seen her at the hospital, because sooner or later she’d end up in the hospital anyway. Dr. Vlk, it turned out, had a private practice, and her nurse found room in the schedule for Lacey on Monday, August 22.

The baby was twenty-two weeks old. Dr. Vlk, dressed not in scrubs but a gray skirt-suit and pearls, turned the ultrasound machine so Lacey could see him. He grabbed his umbilical cord and pulled on it.

“Can’t you make him stop?” Lacey said.

“The placenta’s stabilized. See the white band? That’s scar tissue. It looks good.”