Chapter 20 — HE IS MY SON

Grant Mercer was indicted in February, twenty-two months after the night my daughter called me.

Not for what he did to my family, exactly. The law does not have a name for that.

He was indicted for obtaining property by false pretenses, conspiracy, and two counts related to the forged instrument, and the district attorney added a charge on the pharmacy business that I did not think would stick and that in the end he pled to.

He got fifty-one to seventy-two months.

Halden Row was sold at auction to a builder out of Greenville who redesigned the site with a lift station, the way it should have been done in the first place, and never came near my back fence.

The deed of trust was set aside in a quiet title action that took fourteen months and cost me thirty-one thousand dollars.

The court's order says the instrument is void ab initio, which means it was never anything at all.

I have it in a fire safe with the crayon.

Corinne pled to two misdemeanor counts of child neglect in the spring.

No active time. Supervised probation, parenting classes, evaluation.

Her supervised visits went to unsupervised day visits in the fall, on Dr. Barrow's recommendation and over my objection, which the judge overruled, and which — a year on — I now think the judge got right and I got wrong.

She sees them every other Saturday.

She is not a good mother yet.

She may not become one. That is not a thing I can arrange.

But she shows up, and she is on time, and last month she called me on a Wednesday to ask whether Theo's ear infection had cleared, and she had the name of the antibiotic written down, and I sat in my truck afterward for a minute because it was the first time in three years she had known something about him without being told twice.

Judith is in Sampson County with a cousin.

She has not seen the children since the hearing. That was the court's decision and I did not have to be the one who made it, and I have never been so relieved to have something taken out of my hands.

Josie is nine and a half.

She is in fourth grade. She plays defense on a rec league soccer team and she is very hard to get around.

She still gets up when she hears the monitor, sometimes, and Dr. Barrow says that will fade and that we should not make a project out of it.

Last spring she asked me whether the night she called me was her fault, and I said no, and she said but I put him down and you said to and then I picked him back up, and I said Josie, you were seven, and she said I know, and then she said, "But I was the one who was there."

I said, "Yes. You were."

Dr. Barrow told me afterward that was the right answer, that the wrong answer would have been to argue her out of it, and that what a kid in that situation needs is not to be told it wasn't real.

Theo turned three in March.

He is very tall.

He will be taller than me by twelve, probably, and people say things about that at the grocery store — where'd he get that height — and I say his mother's side, and that is the end of it.

The test is in the fire safe with the crayon and the void order.

I never filed it.

Alma asked me twice, once before the custody hearing and once during the criminal case, and both times I said no, and the second time she said, "You understand that if you don't file it, you are on the hook for that child for the rest of your life, financially and every other way."

I said yes.

She said, "Just so it's said out loud."

Here is the whole of my reasoning, and it is not as noble as people want it to be when they hear this part.

I did not keep him because I am a good man.

I kept him because on a Monday morning in February, in a parking lot, I worked out that there were four people involved in the making of that boy and three of them had done something on purpose. Corinne did something on purpose. Grant did something on purpose. Judith did something on purpose.

Theo was the only one in it who never chose anything.

And I had already watched what happens in that family to the person who did not choose anything. Roy Vance died in Chattanooga and his birthday cards came back in a woman's handwriting.

Somebody in that line had to stop returning to sender.

There is a thing that happens now, maybe twice a year, usually at a school thing, where somebody who has heard a version of the story asks me — carefully, in the way people ask — whether Theo is mine.

I used to explain.

I would say something about the presumption of legitimacy, or about how paternity is a legal status, or I would just say it's complicated, which is the answer that invites the follow-up.

I do not do that anymore.

What I say now is the true thing, and it is short, and it ends the conversation, and I have never once had anybody ask me a second question after it.

He is my son.

The camera is still in the corner of the kitchen.

I have thought about taking it down about a hundred times, and there is no reason left to keep it — nobody comes into that house who should not be there.

But I look up at it sometimes when I am making the lunches at five thirty in the morning, and I think about a woman in a red dress raising her chin and looking straight into a lens she believed was dead, and saying the truest thing she ever said about me.

He notices systems.

He doesn't notice people.

She was right on the first one.

She was wrong on the second one by about eight hours, which is the amount of time my daughter stood in that kitchen waiting for one adult in her life to notice her.

I have been paying that back every day since, and I expect to be paying it back for a long time, and that is fine.

That is the job.

It was always the job.

I just wasn't in the room.