She turned to go. Halfway down the steps she stopped.
"Is she eating?" Vanessa asked, without turning around. "Lulu. Is she — eating now?"
He looked at the back of her head, the tight pull of her hair, and felt something he did not have a name for. Not forgiveness. Not anywhere near it.
"Yes," he said. "She's eating."
Vanessa's shoulders shook once. Then she walked to her car and sat in it a long time before she drove away, and Andre stood on the porch until the taillights were gone, and when he turned around his mother was in the window, holding the curtain back with two fingers, and Theo was beside her, watching the street.
VIII
The lawyer's office was above a dry cleaner on Euclid Avenue, and the stairwell smelled of steam and starch. Bernadette Quinlan was sixty, Irish, and blunt, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a desk buried so deep in folders that Andre could see only the top of her coffee mug.
"Good news first," she said, after he had told her everything and she had read the copy of Theo's notebook twice. "You married her seven months ago. She never adopted. She's not on the deed to the house; that was yours and your late wife's. She has no custodial claim to those children. None. Her lawyer will tell her that by Wednesday if she hasn't already."
"And the bad news?"
Bernadette took off her glasses and let them fall on the chain. "The bad news is that none of this is fast, and none of it is free, and the part you're going to find hardest isn't going to happen in a courtroom." She ticked it off on her fingers. "We file for a protective order covering the kids. We file for dissolution. Children's Services finishes its investigation — and from what you've told me, they're going to substantiate neglect against her, which goes on a registry and follows her. The county prosecutor will review it. Maybe charges, maybe not; withholding food from a child is endangerment in this state, but they'll weigh her record, which I assume is clean. Meanwhile you complete whatever CPS asks of you, which will be family counseling, a safety plan, and proof you've got a schedule that doesn't leave those kids alone with anybody you haven't vetted. Can you do that?"
"I already talked to my boss."
"Then you're ahead of most fathers who sit in that chair."
He did not feel ahead of anything.
The day shift at TruClean started at seven and ended at three-thirty. It was mostly commercial maintenance — office buildings, a dialysis center, the carpets at a Toyota dealership — and it paid eleven hundred dollars a month less than nights once the overtime was gone. Hector moved him over the following Monday and put him on a crew with a quiet older man named Benny Okafor-Hayes, who had raised four kids alone after his wife left and who, on the second day, while they were running an extractor over a lobby rug, said only, "Mine used to hide bread in their socks drawer. Took about a year. Then one day it was just socks again." And went back to work.
Andre did the math on the kitchen table at night. Without the overtime he could not carry the mortgage, the truck note, and the after-school program at the Y. Something had to go.
He found out what it was the first time he went back to the house to get the rest of their things.