Page 3 of Marrying the Pakhan

“They’re not going to stop at overdrafts. I want you ready for that.”

I mumble a “yes” I don’t fully mean, and we hang up. I stand there with the phone still against my ear for a second after the call’s already ended, because if I put it down I have to go back to filing registration cards like a person whose life isn’t currently being cross-examined by strangers with more money than her.

“That bad?” Renata asks.

“They found my bank statements.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Denise doesn’t know either. Apparently, that’s a normal thing now, people you’ve never met finding your overdraft history and building a case out of it.” I laugh, but it doesn’t have anything funny underneath it, and Renata hears the difference immediately. She always does.

She doesn’t say they’re not going to win again. I think she’s starting to understand that saying it doesn’t make it more true; it just makes me feel like I have to nod along and pretend I believe her.

“You need a break,” she says instead. “Not tonight. Tonight, you need pay stubs and a letter from Greg. But soon. You look like you’re about to fall over, and not in the cute way.”

“There’s a cute way to fall over?”

“There’s a way where it looks intentional.” She bumps my shoulder with hers, easy, like this is a normal conversation and not one happening three weeks before a courtroom decides whether I get to keep raising my sister’s daughter. “I’m serious about the club thing, by the way.”

“You’re not.”

“A little bit serious.”

The elevator dings, and another guest steps out into the lobby. I smooth the tired off my face before I’ve even fully turned around, because that’s the job, showing up steady for strangers while everything underneath stays exactly as unsteady as it was five minutes ago.

Denise’s voice loops in my head, flat and even. They’re not going to stop at overdrafts, like she’d rehearsed how to say it without sounding as worried as she is.

Somewhere across town, Ginger’s asleep at the sitter’s by now, six-years-old and still waking up some nights asking where her mom went, like maybe this time the answer will be different from the last hundred times I’ve had to say it.

For exactly one stupid second, a club on Ashford with a gold sign flickers through my head, uninvited.

2

HARPER

Denise’s office smells like burnt coffee and the air freshener nobody’s replaced since spring. I’ve been in this chair enough times now that I know which leg is shorter without having to check.

“They filed for a home study,” she says, sliding a folder across the desk like it’s not a grenade with the pin already pulled. “And they want the hearing moved up. Judge Alvarez agreed to hear the motion Thursday.”

“Thursday,” I say, as if the word might mean something different if I repeat it. It doesn’t. “That’s in five days.”

“Four, actually. Today doesn’t count.” Denise says it without looking up from the folder.

“What’s a home study look like?”

“Someone from the court comes to your apartment. They look at where Ginger sleeps, whether there’s food in the fridge, whether the smoke detectors work.” She finally looks up. “They talk to her, sometimes. They talk to you. They also talk to whoever’s watching her when you’re not there.”

My stomach drops the way it did on the phone last week, except lower this time, further down, like it’s found a new floor to fall through. “Marisol.”

“Who’s Marisol?”

“The sitter. She picks Ginger up from school three days a week, keeps her until I get off shift.” I hear myself explaining it and I hate how it sounds out loud, how thin it sounds. One woman I met through a flyer at the library, holding my entire evening together. “She’s good with her. Ginger likes her.”

“That’s not the problem.” Denise closes the folder. “The problem is the petition argues Ginger spends more waking hours with a sitter than with you. The point is that your schedule doesn’t allow for consistent parental presence. Their words, not mine.”

“I work nights because that’s when the hotel has shifts open. I didn’t exactly get to pick.”

“I know that. You know that.” She rubs the bridge of her nose, and for a second she looks as tired as I feel, which does nothing to make me feel better. “But Thursday, a judge who’s never met you is going to hear ‘six-year-old raised by a stranger from a flyer’ before he hears anything else. I need something between now and then that makes that sentence sound less true.”