Stains on the Ceiling

TW: mention of domestic abuse and drug use

He shifts in his seat. He clutches an old briefcase in one hand and dangles a lit cigarette from the other.

Here-- at the county courthouse-- decades of pacing feet have turned the carpet brown and decades of panicked cigarette smoke have turned the ceiling grey.

A thin curl of the stuff makes it's way up to the fluorescent lights-- the man's contribution to the world, a dismal stain.

Across the hall, huddled next to what appears to be cheap motel art, his wife and son whisper together with a third person (the lawyer? a forgotten cousin?) and a fourth person (the lawyer? a forgotten cousin?). All four wear blazers. His wife's wrist hangs limp with a lit cigarette dangling from her finger tips.

Where was his goddamn lawyer?

Eddie came to him highly recommended by other fathers with only $300 to spend on a lawyer. Eddie had met him on the courthouse steps and gave him a curt nod and walked him past security. Then he said, "Meet me on the third floor. I gotta take a leak."

Eddie may as well have snorted a line of coke, rode the high, and come back down in that bathroom, for as long as he'd been gone. Or maybe all the nerves and low whispers and scary looking guys in suits slow time down.

People sway while waiting in line to contest parking tickets.

The man's son fixes his eyes on the carpet.

James came as a surprise. He was born of one of those 1960 nights that a person doesn't remember in the morning-- a reckless night after a second date. He didn't want to marry her. A friend of a friend of a friend of hers knew a doctor out in the Californian desert who could make it go away. But there wasn't the money to do it. So they stopped in a chapel on the Vegas strip and promised to simply deal with it. The two witnesses on the marriage license were from an older woman with hair dyed red who reeked of cooked spinach and drug store perfume and the man on the street who played the accordion for a buck and signed documents for two.

But apparently eighteen years of parenthood and two strange signatures couldn't sustain.... whatever the hell this was.

Because here is a man-- on his third cigarette at 9:30 am waiting for his lawyer-- and woman across the hall-- who convinced her son to testify and whose dresses now look three sizes too big.

She fidgets. Her dress feels like bedsheets on a skeleton. Like a skeleton dressed up as a ghost to go tick-or-treat. Miriam is here and so is Katya. They both wear pant-suits and black pumps. Miriam chatters while Katya smokes.

"It'll be fine. It'll be fine. I've said the Lord's prayer dozens of times. Katya you know... James will testify and it will all be okay. Asshole. Can't even afford a lawyer but requests an evidentiary hearing? I told you ages ago. You should have filed criminal charges. But either way. Honey, you're gonna get so much money in the divorce."

Katya rolled her eyes, "Don't run your mouth Miriam. We don't know how this thing will play out. But I saw an ad for that asshole Eddie in the newspaper. No one charges that little and does okay in the court room."

The woman whimpers. She knows she isn't paying any of this herself. Katya is only a friend of a friend.

She looks at James. If she really could go to that California doctor, or if she didn't sign her soul away in the name of propriety...

There wouldn't be any money in the divorce anyway. He had given all of it to friends "on the ground floor of something amazing," and to the fat men at the casinos that had memorized his tell (a twitchy right eyebrow), and sometimes to waitresses at a diner when he felt up their ass from behind. In exchange for freedom she would have to work. Miriam knew that city hall placed an ad on their bulletin board looking for a new receptionist for the waste management department. Katya knew another lawyer wanted an assistant to organize her files. $2.65 an hour. 35 hours a week.

"Hey boss here's how this'll go," Eddie speaks from his diaphragm and the words boom across the hall.

"Can you hush?" the man growls.

"Yeah. Yeah," Eddie leans in so that his client can smell the coffee on his breath. "She's an exaggerating bitch. You have a right to discipline your child and you never drink more than two beers in a night. You hear me?"

James shifts his weight from right to left. Sure they had no money growing up, but Dad never drank more than 2 drinks a night. Mostly gin and tonics. He's throw things-- an apple, a paperback, a coffee mug. But he'd never touched either of them. Dad smoked too much, but Mom did too. Just tell the truth. But tell the truth as Mom saw it.

Because Mom wanted out. Hell, she never wanted in.

"Mom can I bum a cigarette?" he asks. She passes him one. He lights it and exhales, looking up at the stains on the ceiling.