Hazel pushed a folded worksheet into my hand in the police station lobby, and on the back she’d printed one word in pencil — DALE.
I don’t know a Dale. Her father’s truck was already turning into the lot, and seventeen motorcycles came up the road behind it.
Ten weeks ago I’d have called that a spelling word.
Hazel is eight. Every Saturday at nine she goes to her father and every Sunday at six she comes back. Four weeks ago the exchange moved out of the Kroger lot and into this lobby.
I’m Brittany, I’m thirty, and I bathe and feed four old women in Zanesville for eleven dollars an hour. I have not missed one exchange.
I sign the release at the counter and an officer walks her out. I wait inside until the lot is empty. I have never been out there when she goes.
The lobby bench is bolted to the floor.
The vending machine by the window gives back a quarter every time, and Hazel has kept hers in her coat pocket four Saturdays running. The sergeant at the desk knows her name now. He says good morning, Hazel, and she says it back like she would a teacher.
In July she started asking what time I’d be back. Not where I was going.
“Just say the NUMBER, Mom,” she said.
She came home Sundays with her hair wet. Shane doesn’t have a pool.
She quit calling him Dad.
The guardian ad litem wrote that children get quiet after a divorce.
I did EVERY single thing that woman put on the list.
Then things started coming home on the backs of her worksheets.
A house with two front doors. A phone number that wasn’t mine or Shane’s. Once, tally marks.
I asked her.
“I’m practicing,” she said.
I kept them in the glovebox.
Gil’s mother is on my Monday route. He rides with the Muskingum Riders. He asked how Hazel was doing and I told him she’d quit calling her father Dad.
“Nine o’clock, then,” he said. “We park, we shut them off, and we don’t say one word to him.”
You can see the whole lot through the lobby glass. They came in two at a time and shut the engines off two at a time, and then it was quiet.
Seventeen. Hazel counted them out loud through the glass and got it right.
“That’s all of them,” she said.
Officer Nunez slid the exchange binder across for my signature, same as every week.
I asked to see the Saturdays before this one. He stopped flipping.
I had to put both hands flat on the counter. My name is on the release line all four weeks. Shane’s name is on NONE OF THEM, and the man who signed for my daughter printed his first name DALE.
“Don’t sign anything,” Nunez said.
He took the binder through the door behind him. The sergeant came out from behind the counter and stood between Hazel and the doors.
Shane is out of his truck now, coming across the lot between the bikes, asking who these people are.
Nine-fourteen
The sergeant stayed where he was, between Hazel and the doors, and Shane got as far as the mat outside them.
I could hear him through the glass more than I could understand him. Who are these people. Whose idea was this. He said my name twice, flat, the way you read it off a form. An officer went out and stood with him, and whatever was said out there took under a minute, and then Shane walked back across the lot between the bikes with his keys already in his hand, and got in his truck, and did not leave.
Only then did the sergeant move. He went back around the counter and Nunez handed the binder out to him through the door, and he stood there with it open on his forearm. His name plate said PRATHER.
He didn’t put it down and he didn’t hand it back.
“Mrs. Kovar.”
“Brittany.”
“Brittany.” He turned the book around so I could see it, but he kept his thumb on the page. “The receiving party on the eighth, the fifteenth, the twenty-second and the twenty-ninth prints his name as Dale R. Wernette. Same hand every week. Do you know that name?”
I said no. I said it twice, because the first one didn’t have any sound in it.
Nine-fourteen in the morning. The clock over the door is one of those white plastic ones every county building buys by the case.
“Is your husband’s name Dale?”
“Shane. Shane Kovar.”
“That’s what I thought.” Prather looked at Hazel, who had her forehead on the glass counting motorcycles again, and then he looked at me the way you look at somebody carrying something heavy up a stairwell. “When did her father last come inside this building?”
I opened my mouth to say every Saturday.
He was still looking at me. It is not a hard question, and it has one answer in every house in this county.
I could not produce one Saturday when I had seen Shane’s face.
The Kroger lot
We did the Kroger lot on Twenty-Second for eleven months and it was fine, if fine means neither of us said anything worth repeating.
Then the third Saturday in July he said something about my apartment in front of her.
I said something back. Louder. He had the door open and one boot on the running board and Hazel was in the back of my car with her hands over her ears, and a woman pushing a cart of groceries went around us in a wide half circle the way you go around a dog on a chain.
That was me. I was the dog on the chain that day, not him, and I’ve had ten weeks to be honest about it.
Monday I called the guardian ad litem, Carla Teague, and asked if there was a neutral place. She said some families use the police station lobby. There’s a book you sign, she said. It keeps everybody polite.
I want that written down: I picked the police station.
Shane agreed before I finished asking. He didn’t ask what time. He didn’t ask for anything back the way he asks for something back. It took him nine minutes to answer a text he usually sits on until Thursday.
The first Saturday, the officer at the counter gave me a clipboard with two forms on it. One was the release. The other one had carbon on the back and I signed the bottom of it and put my initials in a box and I could not tell you today what a single line of it said. There was a kid crying in the lobby and Hazel wanted a Sprite and I signed it.
Then it settled into itself, the way things do. Sign, hand over the backpack, kiss her hair. An officer walks her out the side doors and I stay in the plastic chair by the vending machine and I do not stand up.
People keep wanting me to explain that. My chair faces the machine. I have never once stood at that window and watched my kid get into a vehicle and driven away from me, because the two times I did it in the Kroger lot I had to sit in my own car afterward for twenty minutes before I could turn the key, and I have a shift at eleven.
Four Saturdays like that. Then Hazel put a folded worksheet in my hand.
740-455-0163
I got her home at nine-forty that morning, because Prather asked us to wait and then Nunez came out and said the exchange would not be happening today, and nobody would tell me anything else with my daughter standing there.
Hazel wanted to know why we were going home. I told her the paperwork was wrong and that grown-ups are slow. She took that better than I did.
Shane’s truck was gone from the lot by then. He left sometime while the two of us were sitting on that bolted bench, and he did not call me that day, or the next one.
Gil and the others were still in the lot when we pulled out. Seventeen men and women in their forties and fifties and sixties, sitting on cold bikes in a police station parking lot, not one of them saying a word to a soul.
At home I made Hazel a grilled cheese and put on the tablet, and I took the glovebox stack out to the hood of the car.
Nine worksheets. Two-digit subtraction, a cursive practice sheet, a thing about the water cycle. On the backs: the house with two front doors, drawn maybe five times, always with the same crooked porch rail on the left one. A phone number, 740-455-0163, in the same pencil. The tally marks, four and a slash, four and a slash, then two.
I put them in order by the dates the teacher had stamped on the front. That took a while, because two of them were in the same week and one had no stamp at all, and there was a dead moth on the hood I kept moving out of the way instead of flicking off.
The number showed up in the second week. The doors came before it. The tallies came last.
I sat on the hood in my scrubs and I called it, and I want you to know I had no plan whatsoever. I had a phone in my hand and a number in front of me.
A man answered on the fourth ring. Older. Television on behind him, one of those Saturday morning car auctions.
“Yeah, hello.”
I said I was calling about Hazel.
There was no pause at all. That’s the part I keep going back over. There wasn’t one second where he had to work out who Hazel was.
“She’s not with me today,” he said, and hung up.
Nadine Mazur’s kitchen
Monday my route is the Bennett sisters at eight, which is two of my four, then Nadine Mazur at ten-thirty, then Ruthann Pyle out toward Dresden.
Nadine is eighty-one and mean about her own hair. I do it in the kitchen with a towel over the chair back and she tells me which of her sons is not calling her.
Gil came by while I had the comb in my hand. He’s fifty-something and he works a service counter at a tire place. He calls his mother “young lady” in a voice you could hear across a parking lot.
I told him what was in the binder. The four weeks, the name printed the same way each time.
He put his coffee down.
“Wernette,” he said. “Spell it.”
I spelled it off the note I’d made in my phone at the counter.
“Dale Wernette rents out the far half of a double on Blandy,” Gil said. “Sold my brother a snowblower that didn’t run.”
Nadine said, from under the towel, that the Wernettes were nothing but talk. Nadine says that about everybody who isn’t a Mazur. But she said it fast, and then she got quiet under the towel, and she asked me whether Hazel liked school, which is not a question Nadine has ever asked me about anybody.
Gil said the club would be at the station Saturday at nine again if I wanted them, and he said the same thing he’d said the first time, which is that they park and shut them off and nobody says one word to anybody. He said it slower the second time. I think he was saying it for himself.
I drove out to Blandy that afternoon on my forty minutes between houses.
It’s a double, white aluminum. Two front doors under one roof, and the rail on the left one is crooked.
The plastic sleeve
Thursday I took a half day I could not afford and went to the station.
Nunez was at the counter. He remembered me before I said my name, which is not a thing I have ever enjoyed about a police station.
I asked for the paper I signed the first Saturday. The one with the carbon.
He went away for a while. When he came back he had it in a plastic sleeve, and he set it on the counter and turned it around and put his finger on the corner and left it there, and that is how I read the whole thing, standing up, with a man’s finger holding it still.
STANDING AUTHORIZATION — SUPERVISED CUSTODY EXCHANGE.
Top block, printed in Shane’s handwriting. I’ve had eleven years of that handwriting on Christmas tags and insurance forms and one apology on the back of a Speedway receipt. The Y’s drop below the line like fishhooks.
Authorized to receive the minor child on behalf of the noncustodial parent: DALE R. WERNETTE.
Relationship to child: FAMILY FRIEND.
Contact: 740-455-0163.
The date stamp at the bottom was the eighth of August. The time on it was 8:51 in the morning.
The first exchange was at nine. He had been in that lobby for nine minutes, at that counter, at the same time as me, and I never saw him because I was on the other side of a lobby with a kid who wanted a Sprite.
And down in the corner, in the box, in blue ink, were my own initials. B.K. I put them there. I put them there while I was telling Hazel that they had the good Sprite here, the cold kind.
Nunez said the form is offered when the exchange is set up. Both parties get one. It’s kept on file and it’s honored until it’s revoked in writing.
“Who revokes it?” I said.
“The parent who filed it.”
Shane’s name is inside that building one time in four weeks. It is on the paper that meant he never had to come back.
Saturday, nine o’clock
They came at ten of, two at a time, engines off in the far row.
Hazel had her quarter out of her coat pocket before we were through the doors.
Shane’s truck came in at four minutes to nine. In the four weeks before the bikes I never once saw that truck in this lot, and now I had seen it twice in a week. He sat in it for two of those minutes looking at seventeen motorcycles.
Prather went out and spoke to him through the window. Then Shane came in.
He’s a big man who walks like he’s about to be asked to leave. He looked at the bikes through the glass, and at Nunez, and at me, and he did the thing he does where he laughs one time with no air in it.
“So this is what we’re doing.”
I said I wanted him to sign for her himself.
Nunez had the binder open on the counter with the pen laid across it.
“I’m not signing anything with an audience,” Shane said. “You want to make this into a thing in front of the whole county, that’s on you, Brit. I’ve never missed one. Not one. Ask anybody. Ask her.” He put his hand out toward Hazel and then took it back, because Hazel had gone around behind me. “This is what she does,” he said, to Nunez. “This is exactly what she does.”
Nunez said nothing at all. He is very good at that.
“Sign the line,” I said.
“Dale is my landlord. Dale is sixty-six years old and he takes her to the Y and he’s got a granddaughter she plays with, and he has been doing me a favor since August, which is more than I can say for—” and he stopped himself, which is new for him.
“Since August,” I said.
“I’m on the Kenmore spread. Belmont County. Six on, one off.” He said it like I ought to have known, and here’s the thing, I ought to have. He got that job in July. He told me about it in the Kroger lot, the same day he said the thing about my apartment, and I was too busy being the dog on the chain to hear what it meant. “The one day is Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, Brit. It’s not Saturday. It’s never going to be Saturday.”
“Then you tell the court that.”
“And give you both days.” He said that quiet. He said it to the counter, not to me. “Two days a week off the worksheet. You know what that changes.”
Out past the doors, Gil was standing with his helmet in his hands.
Prather said, in a voice like he was reading a weather report, that the standing authorization could be revoked by the filing parent at that counter in about four minutes.
Shane looked at the pen for a long time.
“Then take them,” he said. “Take the days.”
He didn’t sign anything. He went out through the doors and across the lot, between two rows of people who did not say one word to him, exactly the way Gil said it would go.
Hazel put her quarter in the machine and got a Sprite and the quarter came back, same as always.
Twenty words and a star
It cost three hundred dollars to have a legal aid attorney file the modification, and that money was the front tires on the Malibu, so I’m driving on the tires. I picked up Sundays at Hilltop through October. Hazel has been at Nadine Mazur’s kitchen table doing homework two afternoons a week, which Nadine tells everybody is a terrible imposition. She asked me for her herself, in the end. That was what the question under the towel had been for; it just took her the rest of the month to get the whole of it out.
Dale Wernette sent a card. Just a card, with a stamp, saying she was welcome at the Y anytime with her mother. I haven’t answered it. I don’t know yet what I think.
Two Saturdays later I was at that counter anyway, because the exchange order doesn’t change until a judge says so, and at nine o’clock I signed my line and nobody signed the other one.
Prather said good morning, Hazel.
She said it back like she would a teacher.
She had a worksheet folded in her coat pocket, and she pushed it into my hand on the way out to the car, and I had to stand still in the lot for a second before I could turn it over.
Spelling. Twenty words, in pencil, and a star.
“The tallies were sleeps,” she said, buckling herself in. “Till I come back to you. I only got to twelve because I kept losing count.”
If this one sat in your chest, pass it to somebody who has ever sat in a plastic chair with their back to a window because they couldn’t stand to watch. They’ll know the chair.
For more gripping tales, you might find yourself drawn into the mystery of A Number I Did Not Know Sent Me One Line, and I Kept It for Eight Months, or perhaps the unsettling family secrets in My Mother Said My Brother Died in the Lane. The Lane Is Dry.. And for another dose of unexpected twists, check out My Daughter Has Had A Key To This House Since She Was Nineteen.
