by Dani Collins
Maybe Edith Garvey’s near-prudish modesty was Challenge Of The Week to some senior players.
L.C. looked at Edith’s door. Did he let himself believe she was a big girl and could take care of herself? Or go back and interrupt them again?
The door cracked and Edward Hilroy peeked out. His head was at a sharp enough angle, he resembled one of those doodles all the kids used to draw, with the two eyes on top of the wall and the nose hanging over the edge. “Still there,” he said.
“Ask him if he’d like some tea,” Mrs. Garvey’s voice said from inside.
“Not if you two need your space, man,” L.C. said. “I just wanted to ask Mrs. G what she knows about Mercedes going to court tomorrow. I’m really sorry,” he said, making a more personal apology, man to man.
Hilroy blushed and straightened, muttering, “You should be.”
L.C. snorted and moved to peek in the door, catching sight of a flushed, flustered, rather pretty Mrs. Garvey, her eyes all sparkly and color in her cheeks. Apparently, she’d found someone who cooked her blood. Good for her. Everyone should have that.
He eyed Hilroy, wondering if he felt the same or was just taking fun where he could find it.
“I’m so glad Mercedes finally called you,” Mrs. Garvey was saying as she took out three cups, pausing when her beau spoke up.
“Thank you, Edith, but I won’t stay.”
“Oh, please do, Edward. He’s so perceptive,” she said, finally meeting L.C.’s gaze, showing him the anxiety shadowing her own. “Mercedes keeps refusing our help. Edward thinks it’s a sort of self-flagellation on her part. But if she has called you—”
“She didn’t. S’cuse me for interrupting.” He moved inside. “I came because I thought she might want me here, but I just talked to Porsha and was told to stay away from her kids, so maybe me being here is the last thing Mercedes needs.”
He followed Edward into the lounge only to watch Edward take his armchair. That was where he sat, damn it.
“I can’t imagine all that Mercedes needs right now,” Mrs. Garvey was saying, making soft clinking noises as she set out cream and sugar and spoons. “Sleep, no doubt. Money for lawyers, although we took up a collection and she wouldn’t accept it. She said it wasn’t fair to her sister. And temper? She snapped at Lindy Bellacerra the other day. Told her to quit repeating everyone’s private business.” Mrs. Garvey’s ‘hmph’ had a smug quality to it, not nearly so disapproving of Mercedes’s lost temper as she might have been if it had been someone else.
L.C. lowered himself to the snow-white sofa, checking his clothes for oil and dust first, noting a photo on the side table as he came eye-level with it.
“Hey, that’s me.” He didn’t remember Mercedes taking the photo, but he did remember sitting at her kitchen table with Dayton that day. The boy had been discouraged by a math lesson he hadn’t understood and adamant no one needed to know how to use a ruler anyway. L.C. had shown him his tape measure and explained how often he measured things and why. Then they’d broken out the paper and pencils and drafted a birdhouse.
Inside Mrs. Garvey’s ‘Number One Teacher’ frame, he and Dayton had their heads bent in concentration while L.C. covered Dayton’s hands, helping to brace the ruler and guide the boy in drawing his carefully measured lines.
“Mercedes sent out that snapshot to be printed,” Mrs. Garvey said, coming to pick up the photo and admire it. “It was very clever of you to design such a practical lesson.”
He still owed Dayton a buck-fifty in lumber and a day of cutting and hammering. God, he missed those two. “How are the kids doing?”
“Dayton is distracted. A little sullen. Ayjia isn’t her usual chipper self. I’m so anxious to have this settled, yet...” She set down the photo and sighed.
Yet ‘settled’ might mean the kids left with Porsha.
The kettle whistled and Hilroy stood. “I’ll do it. You sit with L.C.”
Man, that guy was really making himself at home.
Mrs. Garvey smiled at Hilroy’s back in a little My Hero moment, something that both bemused L.C. and prickled his instinct to protect. Really, how well did she know the guy?
She took the far end of the sofa and her expression became deeply grave. “What will we do if she loses those children?”
“She won’t,” he said firmly, thinking of every way he’d fought for his share of Zack’s custody. He would help her find a way. “Even if they go back to Porsha, Mercedes will still be in their life.”
“Will she? I would not put it past that woman to take those children God knows where just to spite Mercedes. Mercedes knows it, too. She won’t leave them alone with their mother at all.”
L.C. wanted to believe Mrs. Garvey was overreacting, but what if she wasn’t? He had a momentary fantasy of packing up M and the kids and taking them back to Liebe Falls. To Canada. Anywhere they could all be together. If it made sense to him, sober and not even connected by blood to those kids, who knew what Porsha was thinking?
Mrs. Garvey’s fine china rattled and trembled as Mr. Hilroy brought the tray in and set it on the coffee table.
“L.C. likes his sweet,” Mrs. G said, leaning forward to prepare his cup herself, dumping three generous scoops of sugar into it.
“I wish I could call her,” L.C. started to say, but if the kids answered or figured out he was on the phone... “You think any little thing could set Porsha off? I wish I knew what to do. Just get a hotel for the night and leave, do you think? Wait for Mercedes to call me?”
“You will not spend money on a hotel when there’s a perfectly good bed here,” Mrs. Garvey said.
“Won’t Mr. Hilroy have some objection to your entertaining other men? Or do you mean you’re not using yours because you’ll be upstairs?”
“L.C.!” She let the spoon fall onto a saucer with a clatter. Her face flushed to near purple. “I meant the guest house.”
“Oh. ‘Course. Sorry.” He stared at the tea service for a long, awkward moment.
“Truly, your sense of humor escapes me sometimes. Edward, would you pour, please?”
L.C. had been dead serious, but he wasn’t about to say so. Nevertheless, when he looked up at Edward, the older man said, “I would object.”
“So might I,” L.C. threw back, watching the old guy stiffen a bit as he considered L.C.’s younger, strappier body. Edward set his chin with determination.
“Gentlemen,” Mrs. Garvey protested in a scold that warned they were going straight to the Principal’s office.
Not before they came to a little understanding, however. L.C. let Hilroy know with a steady stare that he’d be watching. Hilroy held his gaze, silently warning L.C. he intended to go after what he wanted anyway, which was reassuring. Apparently Hilroy wasn’t looking for the first easy target. L.C. didn’t back down, however. It’d make Mrs. Garvey feel good if her lover had to fight for her a bit.
“Edward, please pour the tea,” she said in an insistent, school-marmy tone.
He did.
As L.C. accepted his cup, he said, “I didn’t think about the guesthouse. I thought it was just for owners and their families.”
“Given the way you’re acting, one can only imagine you regard yourself as such. Of course you may use the guesthouse. You’ll have to fetch the key from Mercedes’s desk, of course.” She sighed. “The office is locked for the evening, however. May I just give you my keys and have you lock everything behind you? I’m not up to all that walking this late in the evening.”
“Sure. Thanks,” he said, touched by the family remark and her willingness to give up the keys to the castle.
“You can return them in the morning, on your way to the courthouse. Now, I wrote down the details at one point.” She glanced toward her little computer desk. “Then Mercedes said she didn’t want any of us there, but you’ll go, won’t you, L.C.?”
He wanted to, but, “I don’t know, Mrs. G. I’m more liability than asset, don’t you think?”
“Dressed as you
are, yes,” she agreed, giving his work boots and frayed jeans and faded T-shirt a dismayed appraisal. “However, you’re not attending to help her win or lose. Regardless how this pans out, she needs you there. I haven’t seen her laugh once since you left.”
Holly collected the kids from the duplex first thing and took them to her house.
Mercedes pretended paranoia hadn’t driven that decision, but she needed to know the kids were somewhere Porsha couldn’t find them, in case she took it into her head to do something stupid.
Even though Mercedes trusted Holly wholeheartedly, even though Holly was saying through the phone against her ear, “They’re fine. They’re playing in the backyard with the puppy,” Mercedes kept having visions of Holly being followed by a gold convertible. She kept imagining rash, passionate, violent acts because she and Porsha were both wound as tight as two people could get, neither sleeping, both short-tempered, barely able to look at each other.
And this courthouse was so frickin’ serious. People walking around with sober expressions, their Sunday shoes making clip-clop noises on the polished floor while they met and made life and death decisions in ten-minute meetings. Shonda kept appearing and disappearing, offering coffee, water, a kind word for Porsha, a reassuring word for Mercedes.
Mercedes needed to pee, but not really. Her stomach churned, but it was empty. She shook and her fingers were icy, but she was sweating too.
She should have let some of the people from the complex come. Mrs. Yamamoto had practically begged to come along. Mercedes had refused every offer. It had seemed cruel to back herself with a dozen people when Porsha had no one. Then their mother, Delores Kimball, had arrived at the duplex in a borrowed car this morning. They had all come in Mercedes car to the courthouse, but the alliance was plainly drawn. Delores sat beside her eldest on a bench, in no better shape than Porsha, trembling and stinking of last night’s excess.
Porsha intended to go straight from the duplex to their mother’s with the kids if this ended in her favor. Mercedes hadn’t known how she would be able to stand driving them all to her mother’s little apartment in Holbrook, but the thought of watching the kids climb into a car with Delores Kimball behind the wheel was even worse.
God, how was she going to get through this?
“Hey, M,” an achingly familiar male voice said.
She whirled and saw a stranger. He wore a gray suit, had a fresh, square haircut and a shave that lacked a single nick. Concern shadowed his smiling, bedroom eyes.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked, but ruined it by laughing, then almost crying.
He crushed her in a hug against the thick layer of his suit jacket and she held on, held on. He smelled so good.
“Oh, L.C.,” she sniffed.
“You losin’ weight, M? There’s nothing left of you.” He roamed a hand beneath her suit jacket, sliding it over the waistband of her skirt and down her hip.
“Yes. I’m pretty much scum of the earth and can barely stand to feed myself,” she said in a whisper.
“Don’t, sweetheart. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“But look what I’m doing to her,” she whispered, glancing over to where Porsha was glaring with betrayal from the embrace of their mother’s arms. “I had to put her to bed myself last night. She couldn’t even walk, she was so drunk. I’m to blame for that.”
“Hey. Listen.” L.C. cupped her face and tilted her chin so she looked at him, not her sister. He stroked her jaw with his thumb, speaking softly. Compassionately. “She needs to blame you so she can live with herself. It’s a helluva lot easier to say ‘My sister took my kids,’ than it is to say, ‘I wasn’t able to do what I needed to do in order to keep them.’”
“You think I’m doing the right thing?” she asked, begging for reassurance.
“You’re doing something, and that’s right.”
“Mercedes?” Shonda said.
Mercedes pulled away from L.C. and turned to see Porsha and their mother stand.
“It’s time,” Shonda said. She frowned at L.C. “Have we met?”
“L.C., ma’am. I was living next door to Mercedes for a few weeks.”
“That’s right. You look different.” She looked at their linked hands and her frown deepened, not with disapproval exactly, but with recognition of a complication. “Are you planning to stay?”
“Out here,” L.C. replied. He tightened his grip in a squeeze of reassurance before he loosened his hold, whispering, “Long as you need,” before releasing her to follow Porsha into the Judge’s chamber.
Chapter 26
“This isn’t right,” Mercedes’s mother said as they all took chairs facing the Judge’s desk where a nameplate read Hon. Phyllis Parsons.
The Judge was an imposing African American woman with gray hair, shoulders like a linebacker and hands like a man.
“We shouldn’t even be here. It’s wrong, you know it is,” her mother continued to Mercedes.
Mercedes ran her gaze from her mother’s lined face and wiry hair to Porsha’s stoic profile. Haggard. Porsha was a pretty woman, but she was coming apart at the seams, showing her age and hangover and bitterness.
Mercedes wasn’t faring much better. Above just about anything else, she believed in family, yet she was destroying her own.
“You can stop this right now, Mercy,” her mother continued.
The Judge cleared her throat, silencing everyone. She caught Mercedes’s eye.
Mercedes lowered her gaze and played with the zipper pull on her purse, remaining stubbornly silent.
Shonda took care of the introductions, then Judge Parsons said, “I’ve reviewed the file.” She opened one about half an inch thick. “Porsha, did you know that after you called Dayton’s father, he emailed Shonda, expressing his preference that Dayton stay with your sister?”
Porsha shielded her eyes with one hand and sank down a notch on her spine. “I was upset. If he hadn’t cancelled the automatic deposit, I wouldn’t have lost the apartment. This wouldn’t be happening.”
In a kind but firm voice, Judge Parsons said, “This is happening because you walked away from your children.”
“I left them with my mom. My sister took them from her. I thought they’d be all right with her because I trusted her, but now she wants to keep them because she can’t have kids of her own.”
Mercedes knew pain made her sister keep throwing that poison at her and tried not to let it affect her, but it stung like acid every single time.
“Is that true, Mercedes?” the Judge asked gently.
“It’s true that I can’t get pregnant,” she said in a stress-frayed voice. “But if this was only about me wanting kids of my own, I could hire a surrogate. Or adopt. I know there are a lot of children looking for a secure, loving home. If I was confident Dayton and Ayjia had that, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
“I love my kids,” Porsha responded with vehemence. “It’s your fault they lost their home.” She turned to the Judge. “You don’t understand.” She pleaded with one hand firmly clutching her mother’s. “Being a single mom is really, really hard.”
“If you’ve never been on your own,” Delores said, her voice hoarse, “the mother of two kids, you wouldn’t understand. You don’t take away a woman’s children just because she’s fallen on hard times. You just don’t.”
Judge Parsons accepted the statement with a nod. “But we’re not talking about whether to remove the children from Porsha’s care. Porsha made that decision when she refused to return home to protest Mercedes taking custody. We’re talking about whether to entrust them back into her care.”
Porsha shrank into her seat. Her knuckles whitened where she clutched her mother’s hand. “But they’re mine,” she said in a small voice. “I need them. I need to have them with me.”
Judge Parsons nodded. “I understand, but before I can grant you custody—”
Porsha gasped.
Mercedes felt all her blood drain into her feet. A buzzing sound inva
ded her ears and the rest of the Judge’s words came from a distance.
“—I need to see significant changes in your life. First and foremost, you must address your alcohol issues.”
Porsha whimpered. Mercedes clutched the arms of the chair, so dizzy she thought she would fall out of it.
“I’d like to see you develop your own source of income,” the Judge continued. “Rather than rely on support payments and social assistance. If you secure employment, find a suitable residence, and come back to me with a year of sobriety, I will very likely grant you custody of your children. Until then, I think the well-being of Dayton and Ayjia is better served if they remain with Mercedes.”
“But—” Porsha said.
I have to do this again in a year. Mercedes leaned forward until blood throbbed in her brain, hitting the backs of her eyes like a wash of flaming gasoline.
Somehow she had expected something more final. She had wanted to know, unequivocally, that the children would be with her forever. But even through her dim coherence, she understood the sense in the Judge’s decision. Porsha needed hope. Mercedes even felt a small measure of gratitude toward the Judge for offering some.
Meanwhile, a tiny stream of relief trickled through her. For now, this was over. For now, the kids would stay with her.
Judge Parsons asked Shonda, “Do we schedule another time to address visitation?”
“I think Porsha and I can work that out with Shonda,” Mercedes said, glancing at her sister’s devastated expression. “Right now, I think we just need to let the kids know what’s happening and let everything settle for a few days.”
“Good idea,” Shonda said, standing and giving Mercedes’s shoulder a brief rub. “Why don’t I take your mom and sister in my car? You can collect the children and meet us at your house. I’ll stay there with you for a bit.”