Ch 12 part 2 – Provisions to Sail the Atlantic

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Chapter Twelve – Provisions to Sail the Atlantic part 2

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Interrogatory No. 13 – Please describe in detail each and every reason that you contend it is in Penelope Baker’s best interest that she primarily reside with you, only to see her father 8 days each month, and that you be designated domiciliary parent.

(Ashley’s Response)

From birth to date, I have always been Penelope’s primary care giver.  Every night I give her a bath, give her vitamins, read her books, and cuddle and talk about our day and what tomorrow holds.  I am the only parent who would wake her up every morning and get her dressed, fix her hair, brush her teeth.  On almost all Saturday mornings, Ethan would sleep late (having stayed out on Friday nights playing Magic until 2 or 3 am).  I attended all school events from packet pick up to Mardi Gras, to winter solstice, graduation, harvest fest.  I have attended every orientation (Ethan only attended the first one).  I have attended every progress report/review meeting.  I communicated about her progress with her teachers.  I am the only parent who has ever attended any extra-curricular activities as Gymrompers and gymnastics.  I bring her to all birthday parties.  I have purchased many, if not all of her birthday and Christmas presents.  I am the only parent to attend play dates with Penelope.  I am the only parent to attend Home and School meetings.  I have taken her to local parades and events, usually just the two of us.  I read every parenting book I could find from pregnancy to date in every attempt to be the best mother I could be.  Often times I would encourage Ethan to read some of these, and he always refused.  I buy all her clothes, shoes, hair accessories, school supplies, anything and everything she needs.  I am the only parent that washes, irons and folds her clothes.  Penelope and I are connected as mother and daughter.  We are very close and love each other very much.  In many ways she is very much like me, not only being female, but having some of my similar dispositions.  We are both very active and energetic.  Ethan would pour cereal in a bowl while watching NFL Network on the kitchen counter every morning and then would drop her off at school with no communication with the teachers.  Ethan does not have a close relationship with Penelope; it is in fact volatile and difficult.  I encouraged them to spend more time together, and I was the one to recommend that they visit the library on Tuesdays to strengthen their relationship.  In Penelope’s own words, sometimes Daddy just wakes up sad and mad and he just stays that way all day.  He has a difficult time dealing with Penelope when he can not control her.  Their relationship is explosive and I have been the mediator between the two of them on countless occasions.  Throughout our marriage it has been “the world according to Ethan”.  There is a huge rift between Penelope and her Father.  It was and is so bad that on Saturday mornings while I was cutting the grass, for only 2 hours, and she was watching cartoons, Ethan and I had to develop a system for her to cry for help.  It happened so often that she would run out of the house and into the yard crying and gasping for air.  I was afraid I would hit her with the lawn mower, that we created a “white flag”.  When she could no longer deal with Ethan or Ethan with her, she would stand on the porch and wave the flag for my attention, so that I could come in and help mediate.  As an infant, even on the occasions that he would change her diaper, this task would take 15 minutes and the infant Penelope would be screaming at the top of her lungs for the entire 15 minutes.  He did not bond with her. He demanded that she lay still and stop fighting him.  It was so bad that I decided not even to take turns, but rather do it myself.  When I would change her diaper, it was an opportunity to talk with her and coo, smiling face to face.  The same held true at bedtime, where it usually ended with Penelope screaming and crying for help.  Many family members and friends have expressed concern for and about Ethan, his anti-social tendencies and depression.  Many have suggested he may need medication or professional help with his chronic anger and sullen behavior.  Throughout the last two years of our marriage I gave ultimatum after ultimatum that I would leave him.  He never sought the treatment that I requested.  Divorce was always the ultimatum if he did not try to seek help.  I communicated to him that he was not healthy for himself, for me, or most importantly, for Penelope.  I strongly feel that having more than every other weekend and one afternoon contact with her father would not be in Penelope’s best interest. 

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There was also a list of witnesses that Ashley sent subpoenas to or had blood connections.  The roll call had a typed rationale for inclusion included in captions like an editorial newspaper photograph of these fringe and not so fringe individuals in my life with Penelope. 

Ashley’s starting lineup included: Carla Robertson, (wife of Clay Robertson, the Nottoway Chief of Police.  (Attended many local events with Penelope.  Ethan was rarely there.  When he does attend he is distant and unresponsive. ) 

Anne Thomas, (Nanny, will testify that I was primary care giver.)  Georgia Bricksham, Lucy Jones, Linda Swanson – (Teacher’s at Penelope’s Montessori School) (I was the primary caregiver.  They have concerns about Ethan’s parenting ability and his constant failure to participate in school activities, Mental state.) 

Joseph Ringer (Involved in Fantasy Football trade with Ethan.)  Conrad Moreland (Attended Magic the Gathering events with Ethan) Denise Henning (Owner of Penelope’s summer school.) 

Lacey Hingle (Penelope’s Grandmother.)  Hilton Hingle (Penelope’s Grandfather.)  Ashley had a baseball team and a pitching staff of lawyers.  I had my parents, Martha, and my own sense of the truth.

Ashley’s discovery letter hit me like a curtain at a theater playing a movie I had heard bad rumors about in the pre-production previews.  I was familiar with the director’s work, the actors involved and what type of roles they were typically cast.  But when you see “Waterworld” for the first time, you are still a bit surprised at just how much money could be wasted to put gills on Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper on a wave runner.  There are some fragments of tangential reality there, but they are buried and distorted beneath twenty miles of water and severely corroded to the point of no one wants to even bother diving down there to find the Statue of Liberty.

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On June 20, 2009, it was Father’s Day weekend.  Penelope and I played ballet in the morning listening to my “Idiot’s guide to Classical Music” ninety-nine track thirty-second song excerpt compact disc.  We set up a stage of pillows in front the sofa to be our make-believe audience.  We altered our dance to the up or down moods of “Ode to Joy”, “the Blue Danube Waltz” and “Requiem Dies Irae.”  Penelope jumped in my arms in ballerina glory and I could twirl her as we made up our own lyrics usually about frogs, unicorns or construction workers. 

We made a Marvel Superhero card with Hulk and Spiderman for her friend Brandon from her Montessori school.  We went to Brandon’s birthday party with an inflatable backyard water slide.  Penelope started sliding three at a time with two of the little girls from her class there, while the boys tried to do solo-cannonballs. 

For Father’s Day on Sunday I set up our blue and yellow tent in the backyard before Penelope woke up.  I made animal pancakes.  Penelope swirled pineapple in her Steen’s syrup.  Penelope and I went to mass together sans toys.  We stopped by my office after to print some papers for my court date the following day.  For lunch we had our picnic in the tent with ham and cheese sandwiches, strawberries, and milk. 

We brought Penelope’s “Arthur” coloring book and some of her miniature safari animals.  Penelope hid them in the top storage net of the tent.  We made a phone call to Grandpa Kurt and Pa Pa Timothy.  We even called Hilton.

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We went swimming at the neighborhood pool by the rental house.  Before bath time, I sat with Penelope in her old rocking chair.  I flipped through two green picture albums with Penelope that I prepared for court. 

Inside the albums were close to three-hundred pictures of activities we had done together. Book one was years zero to two and book two went from two until December 15, 2008.  I felt like showing Penelope because she liked seeing her life and in part it focused me for court. 

We had our usually bath time, but we negotiated only washing Penelope’s hair since she had gone swimming so she could have more time to play.  

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On June 22, 2009, the court date finally came scheduled at nine a.m.  I was ready to breathe a full breath and not worry about the dagger I had been living with an inch away from my throat for six months.  Ashley looked at me with a silver stare that attempted to sever my manhood.  All the grandparents and uncles were there.  My friend Conrad drove up from New Orleans to support me even though it was actually Ashley who sent him a subpoena. 

There were forty cases on the docket.  We got pushed to the end.  No sounds bearing our family name, Baker versus Baker, just other families with other problems solved in more expedited manners with less-funded bitching.  This is the problem with money; there is more time to spend on lawyers. 

We were the last people there at around eleven-forty-five, right before lunch.  The judge called our lawyers to the bench.  I realized we would not be having the trial.  The judge was too busy and Ashley’s attorney had to be at another court house at two p.m. 

I turned to look at Ashley in the eye as I was walking out.  I was trying to see her soul with the last husbandly insight that the radiation had not stripped from my retinas, but Ashley refused to look at me.  I held my sight for maybe ten seconds.  Hilton blurted out, “What you looking at?” in an assertive tone.  Lacey gave Hilton a glare as if the passive aggression turned external the hex might not take.

I turned my head, held silent and walked out the room with the rest of my family sans offspring.  The judge ordered us to come back on September 29th.  It was arduous to get emotionally and mentally prepared for that date.  Now I had to wait another three months for my purgatory yard sale.   Lamps, loves, socks, whys: sat idle with a fifty-cent price tag written in crayon. 

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Ashley left me alone to barter with my self in this one man Arabian bazaar of Baghdad.  I sold dates to myself that all appeared identical and mundane.  I prayed for one discernable difference to enter the market.  Everyday was just me.  I haggled with no one.  My offer was based on principle rather than salesmanship or dominance.  I was zero, knowing I had seemed to lose everything, but myself; I was determined to at least keep that.

Ashley knew my compendium of weaknesses.  I told on myself in nightly pillow confessionals.  Ashley chose to be unresponsive, to assail me in pretentions of disgust by saying things like, “Ethan and Penelope are like oil and water and should not get to be together for extended periods of time.  Ethan breaks her spirit.”  

Ashley utilized a void to respond.  There was no inertia in Ashley’s being to care enough to slap me, to cannonball-catapult back with the indictment that I was at least worthy of an explanation.  Ashley was devoid of the passion to confront me or to show an interest in how I would respond to the very basis of love stitched to every marital fight.  A married spouse normally cares enough to want her partner to work with her to be better even when she despises him in the immediate moment. 

Ashley never had that.  I have never felt in my life that Ashley or any woman would fight for me.  I never felt I had a margin for error as if I failed, made a mistake and disinclined to even try to repair that misgiving that Ashley would follow me to try to fix things, to show me better than; that I was worth fighting for.  I have always been entirely optional.

I would not swing.  I would not yell.  I just took it.  I would ask Martin and Mohandas, what is the point of this arguing?  Maybe one day in court some measure of pragmatism would allow the avenue for a two-sided presentation, but now in these months I was foraging through a rental-house hamster cage. 

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Penelope prepared to attend kindergarten at Montessori school in the fall with tampered instructors inclined towards the removal of my gonads.  I really did not know any of the parents.  Fuck, I knew less than four people outside of work that I could still talk to in town.  Ashley was ingratiated with the PTA.  I thought I knew Penelope’s teachers from dropping Penelope off in the morning and the occasional school event or conference, but who knew now. 

Lacey picked Penelope up on some days.  I picked Penelope up on the others.  Lacey got there at three o’clock.  The latest the school would keep a student was until five.  So I had to leave work early everyday to make it there five minutes before five.  I did not want to think about court.   

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I took the training wheels off of Penelope’s bike.  We had that grand beautiful release of balancing a father and daughter in my asexual fingers not holding what she assumed I was supporting for that inch of seconds behind her self-propelled purple bike seat. 

The air severed like her umbilical chord between where my hand once held the rear of her seat as she balanced the handles unaware of the synapse between my phalanges and the structure of her bicycle.  Penelope pedaled on and in two tries she was off.  Penelope’s front wheel shifted left and right and pedaled forward, helmet and giggling included.  When Penelope woke up the next morning we fit a little ride after cheerios and before heading off to summer camp.

Penelope and I played a hibernating bear game.  We pretended it was winter and cuddled in her closet in fake slumber.  Penelope sounded a “cockle doodle doo” for a magic spring.  We went and foraged for salmon and berries (Penelope’s random toys).  We brought them back to the closet (our cave), shut the door and re-hibernated. Penelope pretended there was a moose that wanted to eat baby bear.  I protected her because I was daddy bear. 

I packed lunches.  I cleaned uniforms.  I did hair.  I vaporized boogie men, but Penelope had moments still lashing out at the world.  Sometimes Penelope hit me and called me stupid and told me she did not love me. 

Part of me was paralyzed by the thought of, “What if I handle this in such a manner that Penelope translates a story of events that sabotages our ability to stay together?”  Every act of parental discipline was tainted with the razor-blade flipside of a misconstrued context being utilized by Ashley’s feminine entitlement.  Ashley had first chair in this symphony of custodial jurisdiction. 

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Penelope was in a vivid-fit landing in my bedroom entrenched in frustration and hurt.  I gave her space and waited.  I got on my knees.  Penelope sat in my lap crying.  I held her as she balled into a fetal position as I sat Indian style.  I told Penelope I loved her and it was going to be ok.  Penelope responded with what broke a new vein into my heart and helped me see her world more clearly, “When I am here my heart is with mommy and when I am at mommy’s house my heart is with you.”

I understood her world, Penelope’s little divided magical kingdom of a heart-shaped box she was trying to fit back together.  Her mother, her father, what could she do?  These little fits of lashing out were sidesteps.  My little Peanut was sorting out authority figures between parents and grandparents.  Four houses in four years, Penelope was an only child penned up in more ways than that bathroom. 

I told Penelope, “Hold your heart in you and be happy with you.  You are so beautiful. Know your mother and I both love you.  When you are with mommy have fun with mommy and don’t worry about me, because I am happy for you.  I know you need your mommy in your life.  When you are here be happy here, because mommy will be there when you return.  Everything is going to be o.k.”

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All Penelope wanted to do was put the puzzle pieces back on the table to sort.  I always told Penelope, “Put the pieces with at least one straight edge in one pile and the remainder in another.  This way you can make the border first.”  Penelope had so many mixed squiggly and so few straight-edge pieces.  Some were at mommy’s house.  Some were at daddy’s house.

All kids crave structure.  We are born into this world with ocean-open brains.  We are cells of acceptance to infinite exposures.  Our first priority is to barter the trade routes of language.  Mathematics, science, aerobics, all of it can hold for the conduit of language to license our passage to quench other thirsts.  Structure is the calm in the tide; the tools of language are the pounds of sand to deposit each day in a child’s life to erupt like a volcanic island from the Marianas Trench to the ocean’s surface.  How much structure could I give Penelope here in this rental hold?

Sometimes I wanted inside to blame Ashley for starting this maelstrom.  Not so much the divorce, but the manner in which Ashley was going about our custody resolution.  I wanted to whisper to Penelope, “Me too.  I miss your mom too.  I am sad too.  I am angry and confused too.”  But I knew I had to help Penelope and dig that emotional-mute foxhole. 

I tried to teach Penelope techniques to manage her frustration and find order in the chaos.  I knew no matter where Penelope was she was always absent of one of her parents.  Maybe Ashley and Lacey’s houses were made of gingerbread and peanut butter and jelly.  Penelope at four and a half had to develop a sense of self-reliance that I knew was not fair to ask, but I knew I had to help Penelope get there.

I worried about how Penelope would develop skills to understand that sometimes the answer is no and your parents were there to help you learn how to function in this world.  Penelope was still so young.  Ashley and Lacey placated Penelope with little victories to avoid her tantrums. 

What would happen one day when the person Penelope was arguing with was not her parents?  I think most often in life our opponent is our own sense of self-worth, of self-determination, to know our own strengths and weaknesses and to adapt and grow through the challenges we encounter.  When older Penelope faced these hurdles I worried how Penelope might confront them with out self-stabilizing internal-based tools.

I tried to teach Penelope to calm herself down.  We practiced sitting criss-cross applesauce with our palms on our kneecaps.  We pretended to blow a pinwheel.  We would lie on our backs on the floor and pretend we were blowing a cloud up to the sky.  I even got us a book on Yoga for children.  Most of all I tried to pay attention and let Penelope know I heard her. 

I held Penelope and made a point to just be there for her bo-bo’s and stubbed toes, to make sure she noticed.  That is all Penelope wanted from her father at times, just to be noticed.  She would know that I saw her.  Penelope had this little saying that her special talent was loving and my special talent was patience.

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I was patient, but still nervous.  Besides the gun-shot dream, I had another of being chased.  There was a man with a cell phone communicating with an unknown counterpart attacking me.  The man fought me in the vacant porch house, tracked me down.  He chased me into the snow, then the forest, then back into the house. 

I found lawn shears to fight back, then a knife, and stabbed him until he bled out.  I hid the body.  Then the house we were in was now his house and not mine.  His parents came home.  The former invader turned “victim” appeared younger.  The parents immediately chased me and caught me alone.  The parents strangled me.  I woke up. 

I debated what was valid to feel sad about.  I missed my companion, my wife, my one time “swear up and down” true love and now my daughter could go next.  The debate stalked me.  Other people’s lives might have a slain woman, a child’s inoperable illness, gang crossfire, or a recession income stream faucet stripped and parched from all these potential damages.  What say you for a husband’s murdered heart?  Was I allowed to peep to my pillow on such a trivial abomination? 

(I willfully write my tale here in an indulgent prolix rant; which somehow has found your ears.  I paint the purple proses red to bleed a man for you to get to know instead; of the truth, of a farce, of either/or, of poetry dying on the vine of the definition of acceptable uses.  I continue this tale not for pity, but like Virgil into the Inferno in rings as I dive into myself; I pray you dive into yourself.  Find your duty, your fear, your being, for that is the grand journey.  Let us continue.)

The wound sat inside open, every second, and every hour dead in a living body.  Death and life were simultaneously at war in one shell.  The machine was out of warranty incapable of connecting, of understanding the definition of forward.  Surroundings went on spinning; I just wanted a new one. 

Swipe it clean.  Kill me so I could wipe the hard drive and forget.  These sights were like a thousand cuts absent of the reprieve of absolution, yet I was simply a man sitting at his kitchen table alone planning dinner, normal and pensive, worrying about a trial in a little middle of nowhere courtroom that may never come.

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For a few intermediate months I toyed with an addiction of lying to myself, because it made it easier, but I knew.  I loved Ashley and to eradicate the mark of that love, Ashley had to mutate every memory of the man that I was.  Ashley made me want to hate myself, to hate her.  In some weird twisted praxis, it was the only way I would quit loving her.  It was easier for Ashley if I hated her.  Ashley kept sawing every day until the spine was severed.  I did not love her any longer, but I fought the hate at the gates like ring-obsessed mangle-faced orcs trying to ransack a city of men. 

The chemotherapy worked, but the radiation took the whole organ.  There was nothing left, but a scarped-up chalkboard and the echo of fingernails.  Every sight in Nottoway was like an omnipresent scratch: my office, the sextet of red lights, the Winn Dixie, the blare of trains, the restaurants I did not want to eat at, St. Mark’s pews, the breath of Penelope forming replicated diction, the non-change, the cacophony of stimuli equated to the screech of Ashley’s fingers scraping the backside of my chalkboard heart.  I heard Ashley everywhere.  I wanted the black-box recorded device out.

Out damn spot. All of those things would not be those things if not for her.  Prison warden; shut the door to this solitary confinement.  Just turn the fucking lights out, turn the speakers off.  Please let me be alone.

If the artistry of truck nuts can exist, why couldn’t things be easy for just one fucking day, just one fucking day in this world?  Ooopps I slipped I made a rhetorical self-centered request to an absentee land lord of a God when it comes to “do you right so you can feel better” favors. 

I needed to remember to quit solo-speak.  Get back in the box.  Quit complaining.  There is no allowance for self-pity here.  It could always be worse.  It could always be worse.  Weld it in triplicate to your skull son.  Get back to the front.  Sweep the leg.  Lick the lip.  If I see a tear I will goat-fuck your skull after I rip out your eyeballs with a pair of pliers.  Quit complaining!

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Single parenting was its own challenge, another stage.  I remembered the two a.m. wake up’s when Penelope was an infant.  The barter of being a father occasionally passed into wanting a day off for Ashley and me or for my own quiet reflections.  I knew I never wanted to cross such foolish expeditions as to hope to bypass that stretch and deem newfound parenthood as a sandy no-rest desert.  In that sparse arid melting-pot was the emulsion in which all great elixirs of parental love are formed. 

I pondered Penelope holding the reflections of these ignorant years in whatever shards of mirror she might recollect.  I just hoped to be along for the whole ride, to witness Penelope’s maturity from toddler, to eventual self-bather, to processor of her own assignments, self-buckling, self-correcting.  One day these days may allow Penelope to see her mother for who she is and who she is not; and still love us both as imperfect as we each are.  I did not want to become fatally cracked to get there.  I did not want to sever my faith in love itself, by not treating this parched thirst with great reverence.  I did not want to drown out in this Atlantic.

Each day, each fleeting grip was a gift, a furious play.  The idea of Penelope sixteen in July before I knew it, dancing on my toes and in my arms, in reverie of other boys, burgeoning was a parade of maturity.  This form of love was snow quickly melting, a Thursday drying into a fresh Sunday. 

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In late August Penelope’s school held a parental orientation.  This was Penelope’s third year.  I knew the drill.  The day was a swimming pool of parents.  Headmistress Georgia Bricksham retold the same story about the kid who wore a Spiderman shirt to school and broke his arm jumping off the jungle gym thinking he could fly.  The woman did not even know her Marvel, let alone how to jettison hyperbole when conversing with the adult world, but it worked well on preschoolers. 

Maybe I was jaded.  Before the June 2009, trial-date Georgia participated in a deposition based on Ashley’s subpoena, because she was going to be unavailable on the actual trial.  Georgia detailed her professional opinion on why a little girl should remain with her mother with an uncanny ability to recall that Ashley was always at every event for Penelope at the school and that Georgia might have seen me somewhere once. 

Georgia passed out the school packet with an annual schedule and a pamphlet on “The Dirt on Gossip,” morale, dissension, non-productivity. 

Ashley and I were like a colt and filly in the gates.  Ashley had a magnanimous politician’s grin, nodding to every bit of advice Georgia uttered with laser-sighted eye contact as if Ashley was still in tax class.  Ashley seduced Georgia’s narcissistic female-empowerment dominion over an elementary school.  Ashley pumped sycophantic complimentary ogles to get boomerang accolades later.  Synchronous menstruation allegiances are aligned in such ways.  Mothers knew.  Mothers talked to mothers.

During a break I edged over and asked Georgia if I could have a word with her, Lucy Jones, and Linda Swanson, (the teacher’s I knew Ashley had subpoenaed) after everyone left.  Ashley was within radar like a chicken hawk chiming-in after I sat down, “What are you going to talk to them about?  I have a right to be included in the conversation.  I am Penelope’s mother.” 

I told Ashley to let it be.  My McCartney impression fell deaf.  The morning event ended with a candle snuffing ceremony.  I walked out the backdoor and stood watch from a distance to assure Ashley’s departure then re-entered the building after Ashley’s drug fix to get back to work won out. 

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I sat down at a table intended for five-year-olds in a miniature chair with the entire Montessori staff encircling me.  George stamped the entrance to the discussion with, “We only care about Penelope.  We are not here to take sides.  We really have nothing to say.” 

I sat there looking at this quintet of women, pinterest mothers, aware of my daughter’s idiosyncratic-educational routines, the way Penelope stenciled around polygons, sounded out letters, who her best playground friends were, the way she sipped her juice, the way Penelope recognized land forms and swept the dirt off the floor in practical life.   I did not want to be sitting at this un-Thanksgiving kid’s table bartering for my parental life.  I did not send legal-ball invitations via lawyer heralds. 

Georgia informed me that Ashley and her attorney had visited the school back in June.  I wanted the teachers to see me, to hear me.  I told them, “If it were up to me none of this would be happening, but the fact is Ashley has brought you into our personal life and in light of that I want to give you the opportunity to ask me any questions that you may have prior to being asked to testify.  I am a good father.  I love Penelope with all of my heart.”  I started to cry, tears dripped independent of my speech.  I picked up the two green photo albums with the photographs of Penelope and me’s life together, I brought in from my car.  I said, “Look at these if you want.  Look at our life.” 

Linda Swanson looked.  Ms. Linda was Penelope’s favorite teacher, who taught math and was there in the mornings when I dropped Penelope off.  Maybe there was a juror in her that could be gender impartial.  Georgia and the others did not say anything other than with the geometric angles on their mouths.  I had no idea what they thought or actually said, only what Ashley had written.  I did not wish to debate only to display an opposing canvas.  I took my albums and went back to work, unsure, but at least I tried.

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That weekend Penelope and I were watching Dora the Explorer.  Dora was searching to bring her friend Star back home and Dora asked, “Let’s make a wish, what is your wish?”  Penelope simply talked back to the screen, “For Mommy and Daddy to live together again.” 

I tried not to cry, and gave Penelope a hug.  At bath time I told Penelope, “I wished we could all live together, but that it was not going to happen.  It doesn’t have anything to do with you.  Mommy and daddy both love you very much, but mommy just does not want to live with daddy any more.”

A couple of weeks later another bath Penelope had this little zebra and started telling a story with the zebra to a monkey figure I was playing with.  The zebra said, “My parents separated, because they don’t like each other anymore.  But I am so happy because it was only for a little while.  They changed their minds and live together again.” 

The court date was about a week away.  I could feel the pressure in my system.  I had this nervous energy reverberating in my limbs and extremities wanting to fling myself like an unattended pottery wheel.  

Penelope brought her stuffed Eeyore in my room when we were watching the Ant Bully movie.  Penelope told me to use it to keep me company.  That night I held the donkey and maybe in of itself the fluff did not do so much, but the thought that I knew Penelope loved me did.

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I wanted someone, somewhere to ask me questions, to see this life Penelope and I were sharing beyond my biased immediate family.  I wanted this to matter, to be seen beyond tractor-pull vagina-monologues buffering a man between oceanic banks.  One day I was empowered.  The next I was drifting towards utter desolate Nagasaki sunshine.

Ashley wanted my agony-head on a plate to show her Herod-Hilton.  Scheherazade tales had to be validated to all her Nottoway husbands and wives.  Transpose the fact and fiction in the credits of the after-school-seclusion specials. 

Ashley could now mow the grass with pure righteous condemnation over every blade that we grew.  Ashley could claim I had poisoned them in a conservative berating of a hemlock society of green herbicide.  The green was too dark.  The tangent growth of the blade was creating an obtuse angle.  If Nottoway looked, surely the children along the parade route would pull out their protractors in agreement on the stitching in the chlorophyll?

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I knew that I had to stay.  I knew Ashley would not allay these daggers slung over the head of our daughter to fling at her former magician’s assistant.  Maybe the blades would keep coming even after the judge might point out the futility of her overtures.  My ankles and wrists tied and it all came down to this moment, this choice to say Hallelujah to God for all these knives just missing my abdomen or face and pray extra psalms for the ones that did not. 

What was I to do with this massive sheep-fuck of a life?  Do I blanket this rattling cage with reason like I am a deranged Macaw?  Should I puff this chest and prepare for battle for the chance to love Penelope in an expanse counted in days not hours?  Should I suppress this want of everywhere other than here?  All I ever wanted was transfigured into a vampire bite, redefined despite being the exact same word: family.

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In my mind I could brave my rants to Ashley like Scots to the Brits.  What Ashley and I never were, was coming back to line up the cavalry for Ashley’s charge.  I whittled these Braveheart skinny-tree spiked limbs to raise a blunt defense: each was a pencil-sharpened picture of a day with Penelope in three-hundred digital photographs.

I have felt diaper-box car racers, castles in tidal sands, and snowmen melted dripping drenched in assumptions.  My wife is a professionally unemployed position.  I lay this palm with patient crawl to have a commensurate station before your pit bull mauls any meat of this manikin-marriage to not go rancid.  

Your impression to your Nottoway jury; the only arbiter is four years old.  Either way she wins or loses depending on the manner in which you choose to prove this flawed transcendental point about why you left.  Just go.   The only thing that really matters is the how.

397

I did not owe Ashley a God-dammed thing.  Why morn to light the welcome fires for her war party?  I was going into this trial date with my brave face, my Spartan fighting three-hundred digital photograph clip of bullets, my memorandum letter bombs, and an indifference to death. 

I did not want to term myself to a fourteen year prison sentence in Nottoway.  Victory in any form meant subsisting in that South on South Pole town from which I was magnetically repulsed.  I knew that my polarity was unlikely to reverse, but I knew abandoning my daughter to the inevitable repercussions was a greater internal torment. 

Three days before the trial my attorney told me, Ashley said that she would offer me whatever I wanted for the house if I gave Ashley the custody she wanted.  Ashley threw a buy-out steak for the hunger-strike lion in the stealth of a child support make-up-later ploy. 

I rejected her insult as if this was ever about money for me.  This was about Penelope and principle.  Penelope deserved better.  I would be dammed before I let Ashley trample over that Cyclops-card line.  Commitments matter.  Truth matters.  Transparent rationale for ones own actions matter.  I was not going to let Ashley lynch me into paying her to not get to see Penelope, when I would pay anything in my power to be in Penelope’s life. 

Ashley was trying to start her own circus, putting on the ringmaster hat and hiding the elephants in plain sight, selling concessions to the crowd in some poor-me pauper sales-pitch to get the yokels to attend her traveling show.  P.T. Barnum’s got nothing on her.  Well fuck her.  Pull the donkey and the clown out from behind the curtain and gangbang that loon.  Ashley was crazy if she thought she could buy our daughter.  Ashley may have had the pericarp hull and wanted both kernels, but I was never going to sell Penelope for circus peanuts.  I fell your hollow stalk.

Continue to Chapter 13 part 1