She talked about my mother. Mr. Hargis asked her to and she did, at length, steadily, as if she were reading from something she had written in advance and memorized, and maybe she had. About Courtney at fifteen, at sixteen, the pills from a friend's mother's cabinet, the boyfriend with the car, the rehab in Arizona that cost more than the house on Weber Road was worth. About Courtney at seventeen, gone, then back, then gone again, and then pregnant, and living with a boy from the north side nobody knew, in a duplex off Cleveland Avenue that Claudette had driven past twice and never gone into. "I failed my daughter," she said, on page forty-four. "I gave her everything, and I failed her, and I don't know where she is tonight, Your Honor, I don't know if she is alive. I will not fail this child. I'm asking you to let me try again." The court reporter had noted, in brackets: (Witness crying.)
I had never seen Claudette cry. I could not picture it.
Then my father's lawyer, Ms. Takacs, cross-examined her, briefly. Had Mrs. Severance ever visited the child at the duplex? She had not. Had she ever offered to help the respondent with childcare, with money for the child, with anything, before filing her petition? She had offered, through counsel, in October, to set up a trust for the child's education in the amount of two hundred thousand dollars, if the respondent would consent to a transfer of legal custody. And what had the respondent said? "He said no," Claudette said. "He didn't say anything else. He just said no."
After lunch, my father took the stand.
I read his testimony three times in that little room with the short-legged chair, and then I asked Mr. Tibbs if I could get copies, and he said for a party in interest he could do it, a dollar a page, and I paid two hundred and eleven dollars, most of what was in my account, and read it twice more at my kitchen table, and I can recite parts of it now. I'll give you the parts I can recite.
Ms. Takacs asked him the easy things first. Where he worked. How long. What shift. Who watched me while he worked. He named Mrs. Petrenko, "Halyna Petrenko, upstairs, she's sixty-eight, she raised four kids in the Ukraine and two here." He said he paid her forty dollars a week and she would not take more and tried several times to take less. He said that he had taken the second shift on purpose, so that he could have me in the mornings, that he got up with me at six when I woke up and fed me and played with me and took me to the park on Weber when it was warm enough, and went to work at two, and that Mrs. Petrenko came down at one-thirty, and that when he got home at eleven-thirty he looked in on me before anything else, before he took his boots off, every night. He said he had sold his truck, a 1994 Ford Ranger, in January, because the guardian had said I needed a better car seat and a crib that met the current standards, and the hospital bill from my birth was still in collections, and he couldn't do all of it and keep the truck, so he took the bus now, down Cleveland Avenue and a transfer downtown, an hour and ten minutes each way.
Then Mr. Hargis cross-examined him. And I'll give you that part exactly, because I have read it so many times that the lines have worn into me the way the old hem had worn into the sleeve of that suit.
Q. Mr. Hadek, you'd agree with me, wouldn't you, that this is a serious proceeding?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. The future of a child. Your child.