Chapter 10 — THE HOME STUDY

On the ninth of December I hired a lawyer, and on the eleventh I sat in her office and found out how bad it was.

Her name is Paula Okonkwo-Reid, she does family law in Hudson, and she is expensive and worth it.

She let me talk for fifteen minutes and then she said:

"Mr. Harrison, I need you to understand that right now you are nothing."

"I'm their grandfather."

"Legally that is worth almost exactly nothing on its own. Grandparents have no automatic custodial right in this state. You are a person with a biological relationship and no standing."

"Then how does anybody—"

"There are two roads." She held up a finger. "Road one is your daughter signs a consent — she can nominate a guardian, and a court gives enormous weight to a fit parent's nomination. That's the fast road. That road takes weeks."

"And road two?"

"Road two is she dies without signing. Then the county opens a case, the children go into emergency placement — probably that night, probably not together — and you file a petition and you go through a full kinship home study and you fight for them from outside, with them already placed somewhere, for anywhere from four months to two years."

"Two years."

"I've seen two years." She put her pen down. "And Mr. Harrison, in that scenario, every month that passes makes it harder, because the court starts weighing the stability of where they already are. Against you."

I said, "So I need her signature."

"You need her signature."

"She won't give it."

"Then get the home study done anyway," Paula said. "Start it now, voluntarily. If she signs, you'll be ready. If she doesn't, you'll be the only relative in the state with a completed, approved kinship home study on file, and I promise you that is not nothing when a judge is looking at a list."

The home study is a document.

It is also thirty-one items on a checklist and a stranger in your house.

The stranger was Tom Ferraro, forty-nine, county caseworker for nineteen years, and I want to be fair to him because it would be easier to write him as an obstacle and he was not.

He came on the seventeenth of December with a clipboard and a tape measure.

Fingerprints. State and federal background check. Physician's statement. Three references. Financial disclosure — five years of returns. Proof of income sufficient. Water tested. Smoke alarms in every sleeping room. Fire extinguisher. Medications locked. Firearms locked and inventoried — I had my father's shotgun in a closet and I bought a safe that week.

And item nineteen.

*Each child over the age of five shall have a designated sleeping space. Children of different genders over the age of five shall not share a bedroom.*

I have a two-bedroom house.

One is mine. The other is what my wife called the sewing room and what has been, since 2005, a room with a bed in it that nobody sleeps in.

Tom Ferraro measured it and wrote down the number and said nothing.

I said, "That's a problem."

"It's an item," he said. "Items get resolved."

"How do people resolve that one?"

Tom Ferraro looked around my living room — at a house that a widower has lived in alone for twenty-one years and has not changed one thing in — and he said:

"Usually they move."