My father called two days before my aunt’s dinner to tell me not to come, because her husband was bringing a man who mattered and “nobody at that table needs to hear about your little county job.” Dad handed that man a check for $64,000 over pie. Monday morning, that man sat down at the defense table in my courtroom.
I’d given fourteen years to the prosecutor’s office and seven weeks to the bench, and my father still hadn’t said the word judge out loud.
He said county job.
When I told him about the appointment in September, he said, “So same building, different chair,” and asked if they’d give me a parking spot.
That was the whole conversation.
So when he called that Friday, I figured it was about rolls.
Aunt Hester always made me bring the rolls.
“Don’t come Sunday,” he said.
I was at my counter with a jar of peanut butter open and the knife still standing up in it.
“Hoogland’s bringing a client. Owns marinas all up the lake. Hoogland says he’s particular about company.”
“Dad, I’ve known Hoogland since I was twenty.”
“Then you know he’s being nice about it. Nobody at that table needs to hear about your little county job. Let the man have his night.”
He hung up first.
He always hangs up first.
I didn’t call back.
I told myself it was one dinner, and Aunt Hester’s husband had always been like that, and Dad had always gotten small and loud around him.
Sunday at 8:40 my phone buzzed.
Aunt Hester. A photo, and two words under it.
“Missed you.”
It was her dining room. My father sat at the far end in his good brown blazer, leaning over the pecan pie toward a heavy man in a gray quarter-zip.
Hoogland was beside them, smiling with his whole face.
And by my father’s plate was his checkbook.
Open.
I zoomed in until it blurred.
Monday at 6:55 he called again.
He never calls before nine.
“I’m IN,” he said.
“In what?”
“The marina thing. Sixty-four thousand. Hoogland says it DOUBLES by spring.”
Sixty-four thousand was most of what Mom left him.
“Dad. Did you read anything before you signed?”
“I read the man’s face. That’s the thing you never learned to do.” He laughed. “Anyway, I’m downtown this morning. Hoogland’s got some hearing, a formality, and he wants me to see how a REAL lawyer works.”
I didn’t ask which courtroom.
I didn’t have to.
Hobbs had my docket on the bench by 8:30, like always, with a sunflower seed shell stuck to the corner of the first page.
Number nine.
Eleven counts. Money taken from people who thought they were buying boat slips at a marina that didn’t exist yet.
Grand Haven address. Gray quarter-zip in the booking photo.
Counsel for the defense: Hoogland.
“Hobbs,” I said. “Who put nine on my calendar?”
“Assignment did, Judge. Random draw. Something wrong?”
“Not yet.”
I put the robe on in chambers and stood there for a long time with the zipper halfway up.
At 10:15 Hobbs opened the door and the room got to its feet.
“ALL RISE. Court is now in session, THE HONORABLE JUDGE STEIN PRESIDING.”
I sat down and looked at the third row.
My father was on the aisle in the brown blazer, holding a coffee he wasn’t allowed to have in there, looking at the defense table.
Then the name reached him.
His own name.
His head came up slow. The coffee tipped against his knee and he caught it with both hands.
Hoogland came through the gate a minute late, set his briefcase on the table and turned to the bench to say good morning.
He stopped halfway through the word.
The man in the gray quarter-zip sat down next to him. Same man. Same sweater.
He leaned over and said something into Hoogland’s ear, and Hoogland shook his head without looking at him.
Hobbs read it into the record. Case nine, the eleven counts, the bond motion.
Hoogland stood up and buttoned his jacket twice, because he missed the first time.
“Your Honor,” he said. “Counsel would like to approach.”
“No.”
“Judge, there’s a matter of, I’d say, a family nature.”
“I know exactly what nature it is, Mr. Hoogland.”
The prosecutor looked from him to me and set her pen down.
“You ate with your client on Sunday,” I said. “At my aunt’s table. The one I was told to stay away from.”
Somebody in the gallery coughed.
“I didn’t know,” Hoogland said. “Nobody told me you were on the bench. Your father said you did paperwork for the county.”
In the third row, my father put the coffee on the floor.
“And the check,” I said.
Hoogland’s mouth opened and shut.
“The sixty-four thousand dollars my father wrote your client over pie. Is that in your exhibits, or is it still in his wallet?”
The man in the quarter-zip turned all the way around in his chair and found my father.
He smiled at him.
That was the worst part.
He smiled the way you smile at somebody across a dinner table when you want the salt.
“Your Honor, I’m asking you,” Hoogland said. “Please. Let’s take this to chambers.”
“EVERY word of this stays on the record.”
I turned to my clerk.
“Mr. Hobbs, start a new line. Note that the man in the third row, brown blazer, aisle seat, is MY FATHER.”
Hoogland put both hands flat on the podium.
“Please,” he said. “Not in front of him.”
In the third row, my father was already on his feet.
Third row
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the back of Hoogland’s head.
“I never said paperwork,” he said. “I told you she was a judge. Friday. In your truck.”
The prosecutor turned around in her chair.
“You said that’s exactly why she stays home.”
Hoogland didn’t turn. He kept his hands on the podium and looked at the county seal over my head.
The man in the quarter-zip stopped smiling. It didn’t go all at once. It went out of his face like a TV going off in another room.
My father had said the word. He’d said it in a truck, to Hoogland, three days before he said county job to me.
I picked up the gavel and put it back down without using it.
“Sir,” I said. “Sit down, please.”
It was the first time in my life I’d told my father to do anything.
He sat. He kept both hands on the bench in front of him.
“Mr. Hobbs. We’re in recess until ten forty-five.”
“All rise,” Hobbs said, about half as loud as he usually does it.
People stood. A woman in the second row had her phone low against her thigh, and I let her keep it.
Hoogland bent to his client. I was close enough to catch the end of it.
“…doesn’t matter what she does up here. She can’t touch the window.”
The coffee can
My father has written every check of his life on duplicate paper.
The kind with the yellow carbon underneath, so you keep a copy whether you want one or not. He tears the white one out along the perforation with his thumb pressed flat, and the yellow stays in the book.
When a book is used up, it goes in a Maxwell House can on top of his fridge. There are cans up there older than me.
He bought me a savings bond every birthday until I was eighteen. Fifty dollars face value, twenty-five paid. He wrote the check at Aunt Hester’s kitchen table, because that’s where birthdays were, and he’d show me the carbon.
“Bond,” he’d say, tapping the memo line. “Leave it alone and it doubles. Only honest money there is.”
I cashed every one of them for law school. He brought that up for ten years.
Hoogland married into the family the year I turned twenty. Hester was forty-three and done waiting. He was eight years younger, with a firm downtown and a boat with his name on the back. He grabbed every restaurant check before the waiter set it down. He called my father “Chief.”
My father started saying “per Hoogland” about things that had nothing to do with law. Gutters. Tires. The Lions.
Mom used to say Hoogland made Dad feel like he’d been let into something.
When she died two winters ago, she left him a little under eighty thousand from her mother’s house, and a note on the back of an envelope that said don’t let anybody talk you into anything.
He put the envelope in the coffee can.
Hester came to my swearing-in in September and took forty pictures of the back of my head. Dad didn’t come. His knee.
So “Missed you” from Hester wasn’t news. Hester missed everybody.
But she’d never sent me a picture before where the thing in the middle was a checkbook.
In chambers, with the robe still on, I pulled it up again and spread it until the pie went soft and the checkbook didn’t.
My father’s hand was on the memo line. The pen in it was fat and black with a gold clip.
My father uses Bics. He buys them in the forty-pack.
Chambers, 10:31
Hobbs knocked once and came in with the file and his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
He’s been clerking in that building for twenty-two years. He has outlasted four judges. He doesn’t sit down in chambers.
He sat down.
“Judge,” he said. “You can’t hear nine.”
“I know.”
“I mean any of it. Not the bond, not a date. You recuse, you say why on the record, you go to lunch.”
“I know, Hobbs.”
“Then I’ll say the other part.” He opened the file on my desk and turned it to face me. “Bond’s already set. Magistrate did it at arraignment three weeks back. Sixty thousand, full cash, no ten percent. He’s been out on a temporary order, and it runs out at noon today.”
“And this morning’s motion?”
“Hoogland asking to knock it down to twenty. You deny it, or you’re not on it at all, it stays sixty.”
“And he posts sixty.”
“If he’s got it. First floor, the cashier’s window. They take a cashier’s check, or a draw on counsel’s trust account. Nobody up here signs anything. It’s not a judge thing. It’s a window thing.”
I looked at the clock over the door. 10:38.
“Where does it say what he’s got?”
Hobbs licked his thumb and went back to the complaint. He ran his finger down to a paragraph about two-thirds of the way.
“State froze everything with his name on it the day they picked him up. Boats, accounts, the slip deposits.” He tapped it. “He hasn’t had sixty thousand dollars of his own since October.”
10:45
I texted Hester before I went back out. Tell Dad to call his bank. Stop payment. Right now.
She wrote back while I was zipping the robe.
I tried. He says you shamed him in front of the whole town and he’s not giving H the satisfaction of looking stupid twice.
Then another one.
He’s in the hall with H. H has his arm around him.
When Hobbs opened the door, my father was back in the third row. Hoogland had gotten him a fresh coffee from somewhere. He held it in his lap with both hands and didn’t look up at me.
I did it the way Hobbs said. I stated the relationship. I stated that the court had become aware that a member of the judge’s family had a financial interest in matters before it. I recused. I referred number nine to the chief judge for reassignment.
The prosecutor stood. “No objection from the State, Your Honor.”
Hoogland stood, and this time the button went through on the first try.
“Counsel thanks the court for its candor,” he said. “Given the timing, we’ll withdraw the motion to reduce and satisfy the existing bond administratively this morning. No hearing required.”
He said it to the prosecutor more than to me.
She opened her mouth and closed it. She had a frozen-asset paragraph and a guess. She didn’t have a name on any money.
“Is there anything further?” I said, because there wasn’t.
“Nothing further.”
He picked up his briefcase. The man in the quarter-zip stood and stretched like he’d been on a long drive.
At the gate, Hoogland stopped and waited for my father.
My father got up and followed him. They went out the back doors together, toward the elevators.
The elevators in that building only go down from the fourth floor.
The yellow copy
I was in chambers with the robe half off when the door opened without a knock.
Hobbs came in first and stood to one side. My father came in behind him.
He’d never been in my chambers. He didn’t look at anything in them. He walked to the desk, took his checkbook out of the inside pocket of the blazer, and put it down open on top of the case file.
“Elevator,” he said. “He wanted me to come down to the window with him. Said they might need my signature as the depositor. Then he said if anybody asked, it was a loan to him personally. Then he said it again.”
He pressed the book flatter with two fingers.
“He’s got a face he makes when he says something twice.”
The top carbon was yellow and soft, the way they get.
Pay to the order of HOOGLAND LAW P.C. CLIENT TRUST. Sixty-four thousand and 00/100. Sunday’s date.
And on the memo line, in my father’s capitals, the ones he’s used on every check since before I was born:
BOND.
“He said write that,” Dad said. “He handed me his pen and said write bond, Chief, same as you did for your girl. Leave it alone till spring.”
I turned the case file around so the bond order was on top, next to the carbon. Sixty thousand, full cash. Due at noon.
He bent over it. He read it the way he reads a check, all the way through, lips moving at the numbers.
“Sixty,” he said. “Then what’s the four?”
Hobbs answered before I could. “Retainer, probably.”
My father straightened up. For a second he looked at me like I’d written it.
“The white one,” he said. “He took it at the table. He put it in his wallet so it wouldn’t get pie on it.”
“Did he deposit it?”
“Eight o’clock this morning. Bank in the lobby. I walked over with him.” He looked at the clock. “He’s at the window now. With a cashier’s check from that account. With my money in it.”
First floor, 11:52
There’s no rule that a recused judge can’t put the reason for her recusal in writing. Hobbs found me the form. I wrote it out by hand in four minutes. Recusal disclosure, case nine, with an exhibit attached: one yellow carbon, photocopied, the original going back in my father’s pocket.
“Copy to the State,” I said. “Copy to the chief. Now.”
“It makes him a witness, Judge,” Hobbs said. “Your dad. You know what that does.”
“File it.”
He went. I took the stairs.
The line at the cashier’s window was Hoogland, his client, and a woman paying a parking fine. Hoogland had the cashier’s check flat on the counter under his palm.
My father stood against the wall by the drinking fountain with his bank on speaker, and a hold song playing.
The prosecutor came out of the stairwell two minutes behind me, with her phone at her ear and my disclosure in her other hand.
“Hold that posting,” she said to the cashier. “The State’s asking the duty judge for a source-of-funds hearing. He’s signing it right now.”
The cashier took her hand off the check.
Hoogland turned around. He found me in about a second.
“You’re recused,” he said. “You’re not anything in this building right now. You know that, right? You’re a spectator. You’re the same as him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He’s seventy-two years old. He’s a grown man. He wanted in. He sat at that table and he felt like somebody for one night, and you couldn’t stand it. That’s what this is.” He pointed at my father with the check. “You want to stand up in front of a judge and say you didn’t know what bond means? Go ahead, Chief. Do it. Every reporter in this county will put your face next to the word.”
My father didn’t answer him. The hold song stopped.
“Yeah,” Dad said into the phone. “Stop payment. Check number four-four-one-seven. Yeah, today.”
Hoogland looked at the phone like it had bitten him.
“You’d have sat there Sunday,” he said to me, “and asked where the money goes. That’s all you ever do. Fourteen years of asking where the money goes. That’s why you weren’t at the table. Your father agreed with me.”
“I did,” my father said.
The client in the quarter-zip leaned against the counter with his arms folded. He’d stopped smiling at anybody.
“And Hester?” Hoogland said. “You thought about her? Hester’s in it for forty. Since August. Her name’s on the same account. You put your father on the record, you put your aunt on the record next to him. Your own family.”
My father put the phone in his pocket.
“Hester sent the picture,” he said.
Hoogland didn’t say anything to that.
At 12:04 the duty judge’s order came down the stairs in Hobbs’s hand, and the cashier slid the check back across the counter without picking it up.
The man in the quarter-zip didn’t post. A deputy walked him to the elevator, the one that goes down to the basement.
Hoogland stood at the window for a while after that, holding a check for sixty thousand dollars that nobody in the building would take.
Friday
The chief judge didn’t take long. A new judge with her family on her own docket in week seven doesn’t get criminal assignments for the rest of the year. Probate and small claims through December. Landlord disputes. A lot of signatures.
Paperwork, mostly.
The State’s source hearing is set for the second week of December. My father is the first name on the witness list. He’s read the subpoena more times than he’s read the bond order.
Hester filed her own papers in the first week. She hasn’t said what kind. She texts me pictures of the empty end of her table.
The bank stopped the check. The money’s in his account. He hasn’t touched it.
Friday morning I was at my counter with the peanut butter open when the phone went.
“Sunday,” he said. “Hester wants the rolls.”
“Okay.”
“Get there early. You know how she is about the rising.”
“I know, Dad.”
He breathed into the phone for a second. I heard the fridge door, and a can scrape along the top of it.
“Bring them up to the courthouse after,” he said. “The ones that don’t fit. Give them to your clerk. Judge.”
He hung up first.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose father has a coffee can full of old checks on top of the fridge.
Family dinners can bring long-buried family tensions to the surface – like in “My Father Signs Nothing, and He’d Had That Paper in His Pocket Since May” and “My Husband Said Our Five-Year-Old Makes Stuff Up. Then She Told Them About the Fish Tank.”. For another family dispute with a big financial sting, read “My Son Said I Signed for $44,000 Against the House I Paid For”.
