The courtroom was small, with wooden benches like a church. Every bench was full. Josie walked down the center aisle beside her lawyer, a young man named Mr. Petrie with a coffee stain on his tie, and she saw them as she passed. Tiny, in a clean pearl-snap shirt, holding his hat in both hands. Deacon, by the wall. Gus. Mrs. Delgado and her sister from the post office. Mrs. Kittredge from the school office, who would not meet her eyes, and then did, and nodded once, very hard. Mr. Fenn. Deputy Arnett in uniform. Hollis Pike, who had ridden broncs in the Elko County Fair for twenty years and walked with two canes. Marla, in a navy pantsuit Josie wouldn't have believed she owned.
And Boone. He sat at the end of the second row in a brown suit that fit him like a tarp fits a woodpile, the shoulders pulling, the sleeves an inch too short. He'd trimmed his beard. He looked at her as she went by and didn't smile, and she understood that he was as scared as she was.
Judge Ellen Strand was a small woman with gray hair in a bun, and she looked out at the full benches for a long time before she said anything at all.
"Well," she said at last. "I've been on this bench sixteen years, and I'd like to know who parked forty motorcycles in front of my courthouse."
Nobody answered. Someone near the back coughed.
"Let's begin," said Judge Strand.
It went the way Mr. Petrie had told her it would, mostly. The deputy district attorney read the petition. The words in it were true, and they were terrible to hear out loud: unsupervised, cognitively impaired guardian, minor child assuming adult responsibilities, forged financial documents, the night of October ninth. Ms. Ochoa stood and gave her report. She said that the Division had found no evidence that Mr. Etcheverry had ever intentionally harmed his granddaughter, and every evidence that he loved her, and that he could no longer keep her safe and she could no longer keep him safe, and that both of those things were nobody's fault. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Quintero had been licensed foster parents in good standing for eleven years and had begun the process of renewal, and had requested placement as fictive kin, and that the Division supported it.
Then the deputy D.A., a careful young woman, said, "Your Honor, the State shares the Division's view of the Quinteros. But the record also reflects that the child has spent a great deal of time, largely unsupervised, at the residence of one Dale Haskett, who has a prior felony conviction for battery with substantial bodily harm, and who would remain in her life under this arrangement. The State would want the court to consider that."
The courtroom got very quiet.
Judge Strand looked over her glasses. "Is Mr. Haskett present?"
Boone stood up. The bench creaked.
"Come forward, please."
He came to the front, and he stood there in his tarp of a suit with his ruined hands at his sides, and the judge looked at him a while.