Absent Father

I worked for him for a decade... freelance. We became friends, and he a mentor. But the start was rocky. I was hired the first time because I knew absolutely nothing about him.

"You must think I'm an incredible bitch," she said, walking through the door with her legal team. "You only know his side."

"I don't know his side at all. Or yours. I'm just here to answer basic questions and make sure nothing walks away," I replied.

I spent the next three hours sitting on a stool in the middle of the studio watching as they dug through papers, looked at equipment and tried to inventory his stock photography. Occasionally I answered a thoroughly stupid question.

"So... he sells stock pictures for as much as a thousand dollars, and he has almost a million images here?" I was asked.

"Yes, but it is a very small number that will be sold... certainly for that kind of money."

"But there is potentially a billion dollars in images?" the lawyer stated.

I laughed so hard I had to step off the stool. When the lawyer repeated it in court, the judge also laughed.

Thirty days later, I walked into the house they had shared. We photographed it from every angle and documented everything in the house.

"I told her she could have the house and everything in it with the exception of a few things that came from my parents," he told me. It was worth over a million dollars at the time. "All I asked in return was to keep my studio, my business and my truck... weekend visitation with my boys, too."

Over three hundred thousand dollars later, he got his business, his truck, the studio, a few things from the house and weekend visits with his kids. She had outspent him two-to-one.

Fast forward two years, he had spent another hundred thousand dollars defending himself from criminal charges based on nothing but her word. When there was no evidence, she sued in family court, then civil court... her goal was to keep him from seeing his kids.

She claimed he didn't send child support. I was usually the one that took the check to the post office to be sent certified mail. She claimed the envelopes were empty. We had to start mailing them to her lawyers to be inventoried.

Fast forward another year... she had moved to a neighboring state, seven hours away... and started the court games again. She wasn't supposed to take the kids out of state, or move without notice. She did both. After another hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, he was allowed to visit his children for thirty minutes, once a month, supervised, in a court facility. He did it for a year.

I sat with him, drinking a beer, as he told me he couldn't do it anymore. He was tapped. He'd spent half a million dollars, and he suspected she'd spent twice that. The result was that every time he got a victory... which he'd gotten almost every time... she just changed venues and started again.

Tears rolled down his cheeks as we put a box of Christmas presents into storage in the studio. They had been returned by the law firm that represented her.

Five years later I hadn't been his assistant for a while. We were still close, and I still considered him a mentor. I was getting married, and the weekend before the wedding, his girlfriend called to tell me he couldn't be there.

The ex-wife was in jail. She had been for several months. The boys, young teenagers, had been living on their own. The apartment and credit cards were paid by her trust, so they had been able to fly under the radar... but their private school had picked up on a few clues. Family and Children's Services were closing in.

"[name withheld], DFACS is getting ready to pick up your kids. You need to get down here," was the phone call he got from his ex-wife's brother. He was the black-sheep, the first to break loyalty.

That was the day before I got the phone call about him not making it to my wedding.

He walked up to the door of the luxury apartment they were living in. He knocked on the door, his ex-brother-in-law standing next to him. His older son opened the door... when he saw his dad, he tried to slam it closed. At fourteen years old, he was literally so scared he wet his pants.

His mother had told him for as long as he could remember that his father wanted to kill him. "If he ever finds us, he'll kill us all," she said. After a while, the fond memories of vacations and time with their father were lost. They were replaced by made up stories of fear.

"You dad isn't going to hurt you," their uncle told them. "That was a lie." He sat down with his two sons for the first time in half a decade. He broke out a photo album. There were pictures of them with him, laughing and having fun, riding horses and climbing rocks. They had never seen those pictures before.

He moved them out of the apartment into a house he rented the next day. He went to their school, where he had to have his ex-brother-in-law to keep him from being arrested. He showed them court orders and custody papers. He was able to keep them enrolled, and he became an active and engaged parent.

A couple of years after he'd reunited with his sons, my wife and I were visiting him. She sat on the front of the boat as it sped along a section of the intercoastal, talking with the younger one... he told her how glad he was that their father found them.

I sat in the back of the boat talking with the older son and the father. He didn't remember that I'd babysat him and his brother. But we still shared stories about travelling and people they'd met that I knew.

He's a grandfather now. The boys are both married and well-adjusted. One is a teacher, the other a detective. They talk to their mother, but very little.

I was at a party once... during the "troubles". I heard his name mentioned by a woman standing behind me. Her mention was not kind.

"He should be drummed out of town. He's a deadbeat dad. He doesn't even try to see his kids. She finally gave up and moved down to [location withheld] to be closer to family," she said.

I listened to the murmurs of agreement from the other people standing around her that didn't know any of the people involved.

"That's what you heard?" I said, spinning around. "I guess she didn't tell you the part about me having to be deposed to say that I'd seen the checks put into envelopes, and then personally delivered them to the post office to be sent certified. Maybe she didn't tell you that he had to send the checks to her lawyer because she lied about getting them.

"Maybe she also forgot to mention that she moved... twice... in violation of the custody order, and denied him access to his kids repeatedly. Maybe she forgot to mention that he spent enough money to send both of those kids to Ivy League colleges just trying to see them, as she lost case after case to stop him... violating court orders to move to a new venue each time.

"Perhaps you should be more careful about condemning people you don't know after hearing only part of the story."

The first time met her, I couldn't answer as to whether I thought she was a bitch... but later, I could.