My husband of thirty-seven years sat there while his girlfriend kicked the cane out from under me in divorce court, six weeks after my hip surgery, and all he said was, “Get up, Glenda. Nobody in here is buying it.” He’d offered me $60,000 for thirty-seven years of me. He never once looked at who was up on that bench.
Six weeks before, a surgeon in a paper cap had put a metal ball where my left hip used to be.
I still couldn’t put my own socks on.
Ricardo knew that, because the hearing got pushed once already for it, and his lawyer billed him for the phone call.
He owns nineteen tire shops between here and the Indiana line.
His offer was sixty thousand dollars and the Buick.
Thirty-seven years. And the Buick.
My granddaughter Arianna sat behind the rail in her gray school hoodie, because she’d refused to let me take a cab, and because she was sixteen and nobody on earth could stop her.
Courtroom 3B in Joliet smelled like floor wax and somebody’s microwaved chili.
Pfaff walked in on Ricardo’s arm at 9:40.
I’d only ever seen her in pictures, the ones he forgot to delete off the tablet we used for the grocery list.
She was thirty-eight.
Cream suit. Shoes with the red bottoms.
She looked at my cane the way you’d look at gum on a seat.
We all stood up for the judge.
And I sat back down way too fast, because the man coming in through the side door had a white notch cut through his left eyebrow.
Our basement stairs gave him that notch in 1994.
He was fifteen then, and he still ducked every time a cabinet shut.
The clerk read out his name and I had to grab the table.
Judge Moshe Farah.
Ricardo didn’t even look up from his phone.
He hadn’t looked at that boy once in fourteen months under our roof. Why would he start now?
At 10:15 Lance asked for me on the stand.
To get there I had to pass their table.
Lance had told me to take my time, so I did.
Four rubber feet. My good leg. Then the bad one.
Pfaff’s shoe shot out past the table leg and caught the cane low and hard.
It went skating across the floor.
I went down on my good knee with both hands locked on their tabletop, and the new hip lit up white all the way to my ribs.
Arianna made a noise behind me I’d never heard come out of her.
A woman in the second row said, “Jesus Christ, she did that on purpose.”
Ricardo looked down at me like I’d spilled something.
“Get up, Glenda,” he said. “Nobody in here is buying it.”
Pfaff pressed two fingers to her collarbone. “She walked right into my foot,” she said. “I didn’t even see her.”
“You looked straight at me,” I said.
Ricardo bent close enough that I got the spearmint gum he chews so nobody smells the cigarillos.
“You practiced this in the bathroom mirror,” he said. “I know you.”
Dong Mercer got up and buttoned his jacket.
“Judge, for the transcript, my client’s wife lost her balance on her own walking aid, and she’s turning down assistance.”
Nobody had offered me any.
Lance was already half out of his chair. “That was an ASSAULT, and counsel knows it was.”
“Sit down, counsel,” the judge said.
Lance sat.
The deputy by the door had one foot forward, waiting on a word from the bench.
The word never came.
Moshe didn’t bang anything.
He pushed his glasses up into his hair and looked at my husband for a long time.
I knew that look.
The winter that boy turned sixteen, Ricardo came home from the Route 30 shop and said three hundred dollars was missing out of the coffee can over the parts fridge.
He said the foster kid took it.
At eleven at night in February he put a duffel bag on our front step and locked the storm door.
I drove that boy to the Greyhound in my slippers with $212 of grocery money and half a pan of enchiladas in foil.
He didn’t say a word the whole drive.
At the station he finally said, “He’s going to tell everybody I’m a thief.”
“I know you’re not,” I said.
He got on the bus and I never heard from him again.
Thirty-one years.
Pfaff picked my cane up off the floor by the handle and held it out at arm’s length like a wet dishrag.
“Here,” she said. “Before you go down again.”
I didn’t take it.
Lance got under my arm and got me into a chair.
“I DID NOT TRIP,” I said, to nobody and everybody.
Ricardo fixed his tie. “Judge, she’s been playing the invalid since June to squeeze me. That’s all this is.”
Arianna was on her feet behind the rail. “SHE HAD SURGERY, GRANDPA.”
He didn’t turn around for her either.
Moshe let it sit.
Then he picked up a pen, wrote one line, and tapped his papers on the bench twice to square the edges.
I taught him that, at my kitchen table, over fractions.
“Mr. Villanueva,” he said. “Look at me.”
Ricardo looked.
“Do you still keep the shop money in a COFFEE CAN over the parts fridge?”
The gum stopped.
Mercer turned his whole head toward his client.
Pfaff’s hand slid off Ricardo’s sleeve.
And for the first time since a duffel bag hit our front step, my husband looked that boy full in the face, and his eyes went straight to the notch in the eyebrow.
Courtroom 3B, 10:17
Ricardo’s mouth came open about an inch. The gum just sat there on his tongue.
“Farah,” he said.
He didn’t say it to the bench. He said it sideways to Mercer, the way you’d read a plate off a car that just backed into you.
“Don’t,” Mercer said.
“That’s the kid, Dong. That’s the goddamn foster kid.”
Moshe didn’t answer him. He took his glasses down out of his hair, put them on, and turned to the court reporter.
“The record should show I lived for fourteen months, from 1994 to 1995, as a foster child in the home of the parties,” he said. “I’m recusing myself. This matter will be reassigned.”
Mercer sat down like somebody cut a string.
“Before I step off it,” Moshe said, “the record will also reflect what this court saw at 10:15. Ms. Pfaff’s right foot, and the cane. Deputy, get her information.”
The deputy finally brought the other foot.
“You can’t do that,” Pfaff said. “He just said he can’t be on it.”
“I can tell the record what I saw,” Moshe said.
He squared his papers one more time and went out the side door. He didn’t look at me. I don’t think he could have.
Arianna came over the rail like it wasn’t there, got my cane from where Pfaff had dropped it, and wiped the handle on her hoodie before she gave it to me.
I took that one.
Lance bent down to my ear while the clerk was already calling the next case.
“He never answered him,” Lance said. “Glenda, what’s in the coffee can?”
The Recipe Box
I couldn’t do the basement stairs that night. I couldn’t do much of anything except sit at the kitchen table, a bag of frozen peas on my hip.
So Arianna got the recipe box down off the top of the fridge.
It’s a green tin with a rooster on the lid that’s mostly rubbed off. Behind the enchilada card there’s a folded packet I hadn’t opened since 1995.
The placement paper from the county, with a business card stapled to the corner. Angela, Caseworker, and a number that started with 815.
Under that, an adoption petition I’d filled out in pen that January. My signature on the line. Ricardo’s line empty.
He’d said he’d sign it after the holidays. Then after tax season.
And under that, a sheet of notebook paper in a fifteen-year-old’s handwriting. Fractions. I wrote the problems and he worked them, checked every answer twice, and squared the page on the table when he was done.
The numbers in my problems weren’t made up. Arianna caught that before I did.
“Grandma,” she said. “These are money.”
Every Friday night that winter Ricardo brought the coffee can home from Route 30 and counted it out on this table. He wrote the count on a strip of masking tape stuck to the lid. Two numbers, one under the other. REG, and CAN.
Then he peeled the strip off, took it down the basement stairs, and came back up without it.
I never asked where.
I used his numbers because they were lying right there. If the can has 1,140 and the register has 380, what part of all of it is the can?
That boy looked at that problem a long time.
Then at supper he asked, “Mr. V, how come you write two numbers?”
Ricardo said, “Eat.”
That was also the winter Ricardo bought the Buick, brand new off the lot in New Lenox. He called it a good month.
The Buick is in my driveway right now with 241,000 miles on it. The first time that boy ever rode in a new car was the night I drove him to the Greyhound.
Arianna turned the worksheet so I could read the top.
He’d dated it, the way I taught him. January 27, 1995. Two weeks before the duffel bag.
Forty-One Pages
Lance’s office is in a strip mall next to a dry cleaner, and the whole place smells like hot plastic.
He had Ricardo’s financial affidavit out on the desk. Forty-one pages, signed under oath, filed by Mercer in August.
Nineteen shops. Payroll, leases, the trucks, the line of credit. The way Ricardo’s accountant told it, the two of us cleared a little under ninety thousand a year.
He’d been to Cancún twice since Easter. So had she.
“There’s no cash on here,” I said.
“There’s no cash on anything.” Lance took off his reading glasses. “Glenda, a coffee can is a story. A judge asked a question and took himself off the case. The new judge won’t know what any of it means, and I can’t put Moshe Farah on the stand to tell her.”
“Then who do you put on?”
“A forensic accountant. Twenty-five thousand to start, and he goes through nineteen sets of books looking for money that was never in the books.”
Twenty-five thousand is a big bite out of sixty.
Lance had two new things from Mercer’s office too. A motion saying I staged the fall to prejudice the court. And a copy of a police complaint Pfaff filed the same afternoon, saying my cane struck her in the shin.
“She’s getting out ahead of the battery referral,” Lance said. “That’s all that is.”
I went home and did the only thing I could think of. I called the Route 30 shop.
A kid I didn’t know picked up. I asked if the coffee can was still up over the parts fridge.
“Mr. V took it down Tuesday morning,” he said. “Who’s this?”
I hung up. That was dumb. Every phone in those shops shows the number.
Ricardo called at 8:20 that night. He didn’t say hello.
“You call my shops again, you go through Mercer.”
“I asked about a can.”
“Thirty-seven years you bought groceries out of that can, Glenda. You signed every tax return I ever handed you.” I could hear him chewing. “You want to light a match, go ahead. You’re standing in the gas with me.”
Angela
The 815 number on the card had been dead for twenty years. I dialed it anyway.
Then I called the county. A woman in records kept me on hold most of the morning and came back to say a caseworker from 1995 would be long retired, and she couldn’t give out a home number, but she could pass a message.
I left my name. I said it was about the Farah boy.
Angela called back Saturday at seven in the morning, which is when a person who did that job for thirty years still wakes up.
“Mrs. Villanueva,” she said. “The tall boy with the eyebrow.”
“That’s him.”
I told her about Courtroom 3B. She was quiet a while.
“Good for him,” she said. “What do you need from me? I don’t have files. Files that old went in the shredder in 2004.”
“I need to know why it ended. I know what my husband said.”
“I know what he said too,” Angela said. “He said it to me on the phone.”
“After.”
“Before.” She had it ready, like she’d been holding it since 1995. “He called my desk on a Monday. February sixth. I wrote it down because it was strange. He wanted to know how fast a placement could be ended if there was a problem with the child. And whether it could be done before an adoption petition got filed.”
I had the recipe box open on the table. My name on the petition. His empty line.
“There wasn’t any problem on the sixth,” I said.
“No. He said there was going to be one.”
The money went out of the can on Friday the tenth. That’s what Ricardo told me at eleven that night, with the duffel already packed.
He packed it himself. Ricardo never packed his own suitcase in his life.
“I put it in the file,” Angela said. “Then the boy was on a bus and there wasn’t a case anymore. Nobody ever read it. I’m sorry.”
After she hung up I sat with the phone on the table.
Every Friday, two numbers on a strip of tape. And then down the stairs.
The basement door was by the pantry, where it’s always been. Eleven steps down, and my hip had six weeks on it.
Behind the Furnace
Arianna went first with the light on her phone. I made her put me on FaceTime so I could see what she saw.
I sat on the top step with the cane across my knees.
“There’s nothing down here but Grandpa’s tire stuff,” she said. “And like four hundred jars.”
“Behind the furnace.”
The camera swung. Pipe. Ductwork. Then a sheet of plywood screwed into the joists back there, where you’d never see it from the stairs unless you were fifteen and slept down there on a cot.
It was covered in masking tape.
Strips stuck on strips, the old ones gone the color of tea, curled up at the corners. REG on top. CAN underneath. A date on every one in Ricardo’s grease pencil.
“Grandma,” Arianna said. “There’s like thirty years.”
“Find February of ’95.”
She had to peel back three layers with her fingernail. Then the camera held still.
2-10-95. REG 380. CAN 1,140.
And under that, in the same pencil, crowded tight where the tape ran out.
300 out. Buick dn.
I didn’t say anything for long enough that Arianna said, “Grandma? Did I lose you?”
I put the phone in my pocket.
Then I went down those stairs the way the therapist said never to do it alone, on my behind, cane first, the new hip yelling on every step. Arianna came running and got under my arm for the last three.
The fifth step from the bottom still has the corner the boy hit, the night he came down too fast in his socks.
I walked to the board and put my finger on the strip.
He wrote it down. Ricardo never let a dollar go anywhere in his life without a note, and he’d written this one down too.
The newest strip on the board was three weeks before the hearing. CAN 5,610. One week.
“Do we call Lance?” Arianna said.
“Get me a screwdriver,” I said. “We’re taking the whole board.”
The Storm Door
Lance came Sunday with a borrowed pickup and photographed every strip before anybody touched it. The board went in the bed wrapped in a moving blanket.
Monday he sat at my kitchen table and told me the rest. If the board goes to the new judge, it can go from her to the IRS. Thirty-seven years of joint returns, my signature on every one.
“There’s a thing called innocent spouse,” he said. “It’s a fight, and it isn’t a sure one. The house could go to it.”
I raised two kids in this house. And fourteen months of a third one.
“Where do I sign,” I said.
He’d brought the amended disclosure already typed. I signed it on top of the recipe box.
Ricardo came Tuesday at a quarter to ten. He didn’t have a key anymore. He leaned on the bell until Arianna turned on the porch light.
Pfaff’s white Lexus sat running at the curb with her in it.
I stood inside the storm door with the glass between us. Arianna stood behind me.
“Mercer quit,” he said. “You know that? He filed his withdrawal this afternoon. Says he won’t put his name on a disclosure he knows is a lie. Sixteen years I paid that man.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That board is my property. You and the kid went in my basement and stole my property.”
“It’s my basement,” I said.
“You’d burn us both down over a foster kid. Over three hundred dollars.” He laughed and it came out wrong. “You know what he did? He sat at my table eating my food and asked me about my numbers. Fifteen years old. A ward of the state. You think I was going to let the state adopt its way into my books?”
Pfaff’s window was down. I don’t know how long it had been down.
“You told me she was faking,” she said. “You told me she did it in the mirror.”
“Stay in the car.”
“I’ve got a court date for that, Ricardo. A criminal court date.”
“I said stay in the car.”
She stayed in the car. She also put it in drive, and it went down the block and around the corner with his overnight bag in the back.
He stood on the step with his hands at his sides. The Buick was behind him in the driveway, the porch light on its hood.
“Glenda,” he said. “Open the door.”
I turned the lock on the storm door. Then I turned off the porch light.
March
In March I put my own socks on.
I sat on the bed’s edge in the one-bedroom in Shorewood, the one with the elevator, and did the left foot first because it’s the hard one.
The house closed in January. Most of my half is sitting with the government until the innocent spouse thing is done. Four of the shops are for sale. Pfaff took a year of supervision and a class on Thursday nights.
I sold the Buick to a man in Lockport for nine hundred dollars.
The envelope came the week the decree did. Will County postmark, no return address. Inside was a money order for $212.00 and an index card with one line on it in square, careful pencil.
212/212 = 1
Arianna put it on my refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a tire, which is a joke only the two of us get.
She drives me to therapy on Tuesdays. At the door she held up the cane.
“You want it?”
“Leave it,” I said.
If you ever drove a kid somewhere in your slippers because nobody else would, send this one to somebody who’d understand.
For more family betrayals with shocking turns, read the mother who shoved her daughter’s duffel onto the porch and the wife who learned her husband had been gone since August; for something eerier, there’s the fever-syrup story where the ceiling said her name.
