First Church’s antediluvian secretary, Blanche something-or-other—it dawns on Becca she’s never learned the woman’s surname—holds the manila folder to her bird cage of a breastbone as if it wanted suckling.
“You sure about this, dearie? In my experience, needing a notary leads to the kind of drastic, legal-type action that can’t be taken back. Even a Methodist Jesus dislikes divorce.”
Becca’s laugh comes out sounding more like a sneeze.
“It not like that, Blanche. But, if you don’t mind, let’s keep this just between you and me.”
A puritanical scowl.
“Me and you and the good Lord too. That’s the best I can do.”
Becca pats the secretary’s vein-strangled hands, but then when she goes for the folder a perfunctory tug-of-war breaks out. Little old Blanche is scrappier than her size suggests, though eventually she surrenders the affidavit without malice, smoothing her blouse and even cheerfully offering her services should Becca need anything else.
“Anything at all, m’dear, you hear?”
It’s an enlightening though admittedly disingenuous experience, preparing for judgment. Sifting the good bits of your life from the bad in an attempt to uncover the true, the best and most representative, you. Take this affidavit, which states that Becca and Benjamin Porter have been members, in good standing, of the First United Methodist Church for the past thirty-three-odd years or whatever it is. It should also, Becca hopes, make mention of their time spent teaching Sunday school, the sort of pseudo-philanthropic extracurricular an adoption judge looks favorably upon. When viewed alongside the rest of it, the paper trail Becca’s been so busy blazing, the inference should be that she and Ben are a couple of sane, capable, God-fearing parents and citizens who are united in their desire to raise a special-needs child like Caleb Grimes, who Abigail says will probably need therapy throughout adolescence, if not the rest of his life.
What it doesn’t say is that Ben hasn’t the first clue about what’s going on. That Becca’s been sneaking around on him for months, lying straight to his face whenever it suited her purposes, even going so far as to secure his signature—under, again, false pretenses—on the forms the judge will want to see in their initial petition to family court.
It was Abigail who gave Becca the attorney’s business card—Tobias Gomez J.D., Family Advocate and Attorney at Law—and Abigail who, after Mr. Gomez told Becca to gather as much evidence as she could about Caleb’s uniquely bleak circumstances, had tried recruiting Mr. Goodnight to her cause. But Dean wouldn’t return their phone calls, Abigail’s or Becca’s, and the bubbly Choctaw translator finally admitted that he was probably too preoccupied, and rightly so, with saving Caleb’s father from the death penalty.
“Maybe this should wait until after the trial,” Abigail said. “Dean will help you after that. I’m sure of it. Who knows, maybe helping now is a conflict of interest.”
But something won’t let Becca wait.
After Abigail convinced Child Protective Services to allow Becca to sit in on Caleb’s weekly play and language therapy, ninety miserly minutes a week under the disinterested supervision of a state-appointed advocate, Becca even went so far as to transcribe snippets of the translator’s lessons with Caleb. The lawyer has her gathering a tome of paperwork: affidavits and transcripts and tax returns and background checks and character references. And at almost every turn someone’s tried nosing into her affairs. It’s not as if Gomez didn’t warn her.
“Put yourself in a judge’s shoes,” he’d said, without condescension at least. “You’re just a good-intentioned wildcard to him. Foster care’s a known quantity. An unfortunate and half-assed and often less than good-intentioned known quantity but still. So if you and your husband,” Becca’s heart skipped with the mention of Ben, “really want to adopt Caleb, you’ll be asked to open your entire lives to the state. The whole kimono.”
Becca was taking notes. But she didn’t understand the kimono reference and said so.
“Meaning until the powers that be hand down a decision you, Mrs. Porter, may as well be naked. Anything the state or the Choctaw Nation asks for, they get. So stick to the straight and narrow. If you get the parents to go along—a big if, if you want my professional opinion, I don’t care they’re both incarcerated, there’s still a thing we call parental rights—your chances are still pretty slim. Caleb’s not enrolled in the tribe. Nor is the mother. But his father is. So the Choctaw Nation could very well claim concurrent jurisdiction over any future custody proceedings. It doesn’t look like they were consulted during the boy’s foster home placement but that might have been an oversight,” Gomez said, fingering through the pile of papers on his desk. “This will be different. It would help if you and Mr. Porter talked to a tribal lawyer, as well.”
At the mention of Ben, she couldn’t help herself; Becca squirmed.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible. Not quite saying it, anyway. But if you get so much as a speeding ticket in the next few months the odds fall to just that. Nada.”
Only two more hurdles to jump—and these are the doozies, the make-or-break sit-downs with Caleb’s imprisoned parents—and she’ll be ready to approach Ben. But Becca knows her husband. He’ll mire her in minutiae, challenging all the ways and means—how is this whole adoption process going to work and where is Caleb sleeping and how are we introducing him into the family (what is he, a cat?) and oh by the way how will his care and feeding and education impact our retirement plans—and in the process he’ll end up worming out from under the one question she needs him to answer, which is do you, Benjamin Abraham Porter, consent to take this poor abandoned soul not just under your wing but more importantly into your heart, with me, Rebecca Haislip Cain-Porter, your wife, alongside to help love and raise and cherish the boy like we did our own children?
Ben is the biggest if. With him at her side, anything is possible. Becca’s been anticipating his objections the way Mr. Gomez might prepare for cross-examination, writing her rebuttals down on legal paper, bracing for what feels like the most important conversation of their marriage.
Stepping out onto the church steps she sees a queue of rain-slickered toddlers skipping through a seriously bright, what’s it called, sun-shower, one of these freakish meteorological uncertainties where the rain seems to fall straight down out of the sun, like smelted silver. Bracketed by two appropriately uptight daycare teachers the kids waddle and squawk along the sidewalk, cute distractible little ducklings, at once carefree and mindful of their handlers.
She’s putting up her umbrella when a woman’s voice calls out: “Becca!”
Gloria—keeping-it-real-Gloria, from the Teamsters—is toiling up the church steps through the downpour. Swallowed by the colorless frump of an afghan sweater, her kinky black afro tied into a slapdash bun, the woman’s normally warm gaze has cooled to permafrost. She crowds under Becca’s umbrella, honking her nose into a balled-up Kleenex, and tries to make small talk. But the poor dear looks miserable.
“How are things going, Gloria?” she asks.
Gloria fakes a brave face. But the tremor in her cheeks tells the real story.
“He left me. Lazy old gadabout finally got off the couch and tells me he wants a divorce. Skipped the trial separation and went straight to big-D! Says he’s met another woman. A younger woman. A white woman! Says he can talk to her? Says he’s tired of me riding him? Says they’re going to live a fuller life than the one I can give. Like it’s my job to keep him entertained, on top of the cooking and the budgeting and the caring for the kids?”
Gloria blots her watering eyes with the wad of Kleenex and in the sniffly silence that follows, Becca watches the caravan of baby ducklings dogleg right onto Robinson Avenue, headed for the Murrah center daycare, maybe, down the way?
Now a massive storm cloud is steamrolling across the sun, glooming the church steps in a skewbald darkness while spotlighting the children with a single column of fair weather. Aunt Mabel called this postcard type of light Jacob’s Ladder, and for some obscure reason the sight of it floods Becca’s heart with a complex cocktail of emotion: guilt and fear and wonder and foreboding, yes, but most of all hope and even joy, joy all out of proportion to her recent double-dealings.
Gloria resumes her abstracted daze. She’s talking, but you get the sense it’s only to put off going inside the church.
“. . . might be he had a point about the communication. The two of us weren’t even speaking in complete sentences toward the end.” A quick shake of her head; Gloria’s doing her best to come up for air.
Becca wants to offer some bit of wisdom, something to help the poor woman through her troubles. But the thing she should say isn’t true, probably, or not nearly true enough. And the true thing, she’s realizing, shouldn’t always be said.
“So why are you here, Becca, on a Tuesday afternoon? And in this weather?”
Becca hugs the manila folder more tightly to her side.
“I’m just getting ready for next Sunday’s class. You’ll be there?”
A humorless, rasping laugh.
“Looks like I’ll be S.O.S. for a while.”
That freshet of hope in Becca’s chest has frozen over with the lie. As Gloria makes her way into the church the last of the children disappears around the corner, leaving Becca all alone in the cold mizzling half-light to wonder: is this how it feels, being a criminal?