Authors: Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Jack still had the
Amarillo Globe News
delivered to Williams & Associates every morning, and I grabbed the paper from the floor outside the door as I walked into the office. Snowflake spun in circles as she waited to see what I’d brought her. The four-pound Pomeranian ruled the place. Not that Jack told me this himself, but she’d belonged to Jack’s young daughter. I’d seen the picture of her holding the dog as a pup with a red bow around her little white neck out at Jack’s family’s place, a racehorse breeding facility in southern New Mexico called Wrong Turn Ranch.
“Hi, girl.” I offered the dog one of the buttery toast crusts I brought her from my own breakfast each day, and she gobbled it up.
Setting my purse down on the desk in my lobby office, I shook the paper open and laid it beside my keyboard. Standing, I read the highlights. The murder at Love’s grabbed the headline below the fold. “No Leads on Truck Stop Murder.” I scanned it. Charlie Tucker—that had been the guy’s name—from Oklahoma. No mention of a suspect, or even witnesses. The article mentioned that this was the first murder at that Love’s Travel Stop, but that the police had been called out on multiple occasions before for “public indecency.” My nose wrinkled. Public indecency could be a whole lot of different things—child sex crimes, pimping, prostitution, obscenity—none of them something I wanted to think about this early in the morning. Officer Samson’s lot lizard remark sprang to mind.
The right-hand article below the fold caught my eye, too. “Phil Samson Named APD Officer of the Quarter.” A picture of Samson accompanied the article.
“Speak of the devil,” I said aloud.
I sat down in my chair. I scanned the article while my computer booted up. Apparently Samson crawled in through the sunroof of a car that had been hit by a drunk driver. He discovered a boy who had stopped breathing. The story described how he’d dragged the child out and saved him with CPR, amongst other acts of heroism.
Someone shoved the door open, rattling the walls.
Wallace’s voice shredded the silence. “What the hell, Emily?”
Snowflake sprinted over to dance around Wallace’s size-twelve feet, the tags on her collar jingling and her toenails clicking on the beige and rust-colored tile floor.
“In a minute, Princess,” he said to her, as he balanced a tray holding two coffees.
A tall woman in biker clothes with jet-black hair, sleeve tattoos on her pale arms, and a nose ring followed closely behind him, holding a coffee of her own. Our mutual friend Nadine, a Thai waitress by day and a drink slinger by night at the Polo Club, one of Amarillo’s finest stripping establishments.
“Good morning, Nadine.”
“Morning,” she mumbled. Her bloodshot eyes suggested she’d worked the late shift.
I addressed Wallace. “I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Gray, and how are you?” I tilted my head. “Oh, is that coffee for me?”
He handed me a tall Roasters cup and pulled the other out and set it on the corner of my desk. Then he leaned over and ruffled Snowflake’s hair.
“Breve?” I asked.
“Do bears relieve themselves in the woods?”
Wallace had memorized how I took my coffee even though I secretly kept my Roasters order on a page in my iPhone’s note app. Some things just didn’t stick in my gray matter. Coffee orders, phone numbers, whether or not it was okay to wear white shoes before Memorial Day.
“Ah, you’re so sweet. Thank you.”
Wallace air-kissed at me, then put his grim-lipped face back on. “You’re making my life difficult, you know that? This situation with Betsy is
tres
tricky. You can’t go around stalking the kid behind my back when I’m trying to help you adopt her.”
Nadine took a seat on the tweed couch underneath a Remington knock-off of a cattle drive, but Wallace remained standing in front of me with his hands on his hips. Wallace was over six feet tall, but today his hair poof gave him an extra inch of height.
“Hardly stalking. I’ve tried to be patient, but those people are impossible.” I sat down and jarred my desk with my knee, almost knocking over the framed picture of Geronimo that Jack had given me, along with one of his most famous quotes:
“There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God.”
I continued my rant: “They won’t even let me take her a Christmas present. I don’t think they’re allowing Christmas presents at all, for that matter.”
Wallace frowned and pondered the Christmas tree Jack had let me buy for the corner of my office area. Instead of putting a star on top, I’d crowned it with a berobed Lady Justice with her blindfold, sword, and scales, who I’d glued to a Popsicle stick before attaching it to the tree with pipe cleaners. Christmas rocked. What was wrong with those people?
Nadine swallowed her coffee too fast and coughed, then said, “That’s nucking futs.”
“I know! Please, Wallace, can you get permission for me to take Betsy a gift? Please?”
He looked back at me from the tree. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t make you any promises.”
“Or at least deliver it to her.” I pulled the new pink backpack from where I’d stashed it a few days ago under my desk.
Nadine pointed at it. “I could get that to her, tell them it’s from the Rainbow Room.” In addition to her two part-time jobs and raising two kids as a single mom, Nadine volunteered a few hours a month at the Rainbow Room, helping outfit less fortunate kids and families with the bare necessities. They worked hand in hand with CPS, which is how she and Wallace had come to be friends.
Wallace nodded. “That could work.”
“Thank you, Nadine.” I handed the empty backpack to her. “I’m not exaggerating, Wallace. They’re freaky—and scary.”
“What do you mean by ‘scary’?” He pulled a blue upholstered armchair from beside my desk that had been displaced by the Christmas tree. He plopped down into it.
“Babbling about the wrath of God, siccing the cops on me. She gave me nightmares. If she can do that to me, how must those kids she fosters feel around her?”
“They have nothing but nice things to say about her.”
“Because she’d threaten them with the wrath of God if they didn’t, I’ll bet.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
Nadine chimed in. “I think there’s such a thing as too religious.”
He laughed. “Coming from an agnostic, that isn’t surprising.”
I said, “History is full of horrible things done by zealots in the name of religion.”
“As are current events. I’m not sure the Hodges are zealots, though. They
are
definitely very religious, and they’re strict. But the kids do well under their watch, so far. And it’s a blessing to me to have someone eager to take the special needs kids.”
I frowned. “But Betsy isn’t special needs.”
“She is in the foster system. It’s different than in the medical and educational worlds, where
special needs
means autism spectrum or learning disabilities or cystic fibrosis or something like that. Foster-care special needs includes all that, but it also means kids that are older, and thus hard to place, or part of a sibling group, and thus hard to place, or a minority over the age of two, and you get the picture.” He’d described the line of ducklings I’d seen with Hodges to a T.
“And Betsy falls in the last category.”
“Six-year-old Mexican girl? Definitely.”
“But she wouldn’t be hard to place. I want her.”
“I know you do. And I know you’re getting set up to foster and adopt as fast as you can. I am so proud of you, honey, really, I am, but where are you on the house hunting?”
“I’m going to look at a duplex today.” I held up three fingers in the Scout’s honor gesture.
“Okay, keep me posted. Meanwhile, a stable family has taken her in. Try to think of that as a good thing.”
I shuddered. “Stable except that they keep expanding. Exponentially, practically. How many do they have right now?”
“Including their own? Twelve.”
Nadine’s eyes popped wide. “No way. Twelve?”
I shook my head. “Holy guacamole. How can they take care of that many?”
“How have people ever? My best friend at SMU was a Mormon. Ninth of twelve. The older ones help by taking care of the younger ones.”
I hadn’t known he’d gone to SMU, but somehow I wasn’t surprised, even though he was from Houston. “I was one of one. And my mother barely held it together.”
Wallace smacked his palm to his forehead. “‘Things not to say in your foster and adoption home study interviews,’ by Emily Bernal. Closely followed by ‘I was arrested for taking improper photographs of children.’”
“Noted.” I sipped coffee. Wallace pointed at me then pantomimed wiping his lip. I ignored him and took another sip. “I guess the bigger question is why anyone would want twelve or however many temporary kids. Besides being a do-gooder, I mean.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Really?”
“What, is that a dumb question?”
“Not from a former beauty queen, I suppose.” He changed his voice to a southern drawl. “Some people out there in our nation don’t have maps.”
“Huh?” Nadine said.
You’d either caught the famously clueless answer to a pageant question by Miss South Carolina in the Miss Teen USA pageant back in 2007 or you hadn’t. Or maybe I watched too many beauty pageants.
“Very funny, wise guy.” To Nadine I said, “Beauty pageant joke.”
Wallace flipped his hand over, dismissing me. “They’re Christians. They believe it’s their duty, plus they get to save all those souls.”
Nadine shook her head. “They want the kids because of money. They get seven hundred dollars apiece, monthly. Do that math.”
“In my head? I wasn’t a math major.” I punched it into the calculator on my computer.
“It was sort of a rhetorical question.”
“Except that it wasn’t a question.” I looked up. “Eight thousand four hundred smackers a month. One hundred thousand and change a year. Wow.”
“And if you’re frugal, you can live on that, even with twelve kids. No outside income required.”
“So it’s Mary Alice’s job.”
Nadine snorted. “Proving I’m in the wrong line of work.”
Wallace said, “And her husband’s job, too, what’s-his-name.”
He hadn’t asked, but I filled in the blank anyway. “Trevon.” I had their dossier memorized.
“Yep. Well, enough of that.” Wallace jumped to his feet and grabbed a bronze bell with a black handle off my desk. Jack kept it there so I could let him know when I was coming down the hall, since his office doubled as his condo, complete with a Murphy bed cleverly hidden in some built-ins. Wallace rang it vigorously. “I have to see Jack.”
I winked at Nadine. “He’s still straight, Wallace.”
“Details.” He kept ringing. “I need an update on Betsy’s petition.”
Wallace was referring to a Special Immigrant Juvenile status petition that Jack was putting together, pro bono, for Betsy. On top of that, Jack was preparing to file a survivor action on her behalf for the wrongful death of her mother, Sofia, who was murdered while incarcerated in the Potter County Detention Center. First we had to exhaust the completely unhelpful grievance process with PCDC, though, however long that took.
“Don’t mind us,” Nadine said.
Wallace kept ringing.
“He’s probably on the phone and gonna come down the hall and kick your butt for making that racket.” I pointed at the still-ringing bell.
Wallace set it down. In a thick accent and girly voice he said, “You think Jack’s gonna ‘kick my butt’? Well, spit.”
“Mock my ladylike manners if you must, but we’ll see who gets to move to the front of the line at the Pearly Gates.”
Heavy footsteps stomped down the hall toward us before we saw Jack.
“What in hell is so important?” He stalked into the lobby, the hem of his jeans halfway in his boot tops, his shirttail untucked. His hair was mussed and pupils wide. A spider web of creases marred his cheek, and he had a little wet smudge by the corner of his lips.
I tried not to laugh but felt my lips compress.
Wallace put a hand on one hip. “I thought this office could use a little more cowbell.”
Jack rubbed his eyes and looked blank, but Wallace, Nadine, and I laughed.
“Hi, Jack,” Nadine said.
“Morning, Nadine.”
Wallace reached his hand out, and Jack shook it. “Seriously, I want an update on Betsy.”
The office phone rang, which only happened during business hours when Jack’s secretary, Judith, transferred calls directly to us from his office in Tularosa, New Mexico. Otherwise, she handled it, or it went to voice mail. I looked down at the phone. A red light by my extension indicated the call was for me, not Jack.
I picked it up. “Williams and Associates, Emily Bernal speaking.”
I heard deep breathing on the other end. Jack and Wallace continued talking without me.
“May I help you?”
Click.
Weird. I hung up and tried to rejoin the conversation, but it didn’t take long to get lost when the subject was immigration. I was a litigation paralegal—board certified in civil litigation, in fact—recently converted to criminal law, where I had far to go before I achieved mastery, as it was. Now I was tackling immigration, and I’d learned a lot about this foreign-to-me (no pun intended) area of the law in the past two months, more than I’d ever aspired to. My head swam with acronyms: DACA, DAPA, DHS, USCIS, ICE. Family law, too. Fewer acronyms there, but lots of new concepts around guardianship, foster care, and adoption. And I’d even picked up some estate/probate where it crossed over with family law. Throw the immigration, family, and estate laws in on top of the criminal, and I had one overfull cranium.
One thing I did understand clearly: Betsy needed permanent legal resident status, and the only way she could get that was if the Department of Homeland Security, the aforementioned DHS, granted her Special Immigrant Juvenile status and issued her a J visa. Which they might do if we could produce her birth certificate, prove that she was a ward of the state of Texas, and show that it was in her best interests to remain in the U.S.
We had jumped through some of those hoops already. CPS was administering her temporary living arrangements and issuing checks to the Hodges for her care. The probate court that handled Sofia Perez’s estate—which included virtually nothing except guardianship of Betsy—had signed an order making Betsy a state ward. Jack had received it the day before.