Chapter Thirteen – Bulldogs and Pinchers Part 1
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September
29, 2009, court was a library Tuesday. I
waited nine and a half months. The same
length of time to bring Penelope into this world was the same length to find
out if I would lose the greatest part of Penelope for the rest of her legal
“minor” time in it. I knew what it meant
to be an in-law and not a son, a brother, or bound by hemoglobin.
On
the previous Friday, I got a list of questions from my attorney Martha that she
planned on asking my parents and me.
That was the same day Martha told me about Ashley’s offer of trading the
house for Penelope. As if Penelope’s
life could be broken down into a financial transaction like a detailed receipt.
I
spent the weekend with Penelope. On
Saturday we saw a 3-D movie called “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” based on
a book we borrowed from the library. We
had an afternoon play date with Penelope’s friend Annabelle and her little
sister June with their dad David at my house.
David’s
wife Molly had come by with their kids on a Saturday back in August. We were reading Rapunzel when Annabelle
knocked. While we were waiting we read
the Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Clothes. Penelope always remembered in the non-Disney
version how the Little Mermaid felt like swords sliced her legs with each
step.
Penelope
and Annabelle were two peas in a pod. In
August, Annabelle and Penelope played dress-up and created a makeshift stuffed-animal hospital by
applying tape as bandages. We painted
ceramic ponies. I fixed ham sandwiches
with strawberries. The kids played camp
out with Penelope’s pink camouflage sleeping bag.
I
spoke with Annabelle’s mother, Molly, while the kids cavorted. I appreciated the novel opportunity to
converse with a fellow parent. Ashley
had Molly over at the porch-house in this interim. Molly was privy to details of rationale built
up in Ashley’s gerrymandered voting community.
Penelope
and Annabelle were best friends. Molly
had no idea what had really happened.
Molly was told I had some sort of anti-social disorder, that I was a
negative presence in Penelope’s life.
Molly said, “I had no idea what she is doing to you. I came over here to look out for Penelope
like you had her locked up or something.
Ashley told me not to come, but you asked me at the school, so I came
over here for Penelope.” I told Molly,
“Ashley is a good mom, but this is all rationalized heroism. This is manufactured drama where there is
none.”
On
this fast-forward day from August to September, Molly felt a divided
allegiance, gender ties bound to what the left ear received versus the
right. Molly felt it simpler to send her
husband David. I understood. This was a play date. I was not going to subpoena anyone. All I wanted was for Penelope to know she had
one life, one body, alive in both houses and her friends were welcome in each.
399
On
Sunday Penelope and I went to church together.
My parents and Tim came over on Sunday afternoon. We watched the Saints march over the Bills 27
to 7.
On
Monday, like most days of work in the past year gestating this court date,
focusing on anything, but the inevitable was problematic. My productivity was infertile. My schedule was inherently flawed for
procrastination and legal preparations.
After the stillbirths in March and June, I was praying for a September
resolution.
I
took Penelope to the library a day early.
We read some anthropomorphic Berenstain Bears. On Tuesday morning I treated the routine with
Penelope as normal as I could. I dropped
Penelope off at school. I said good
morning to Ms. Linda. I did not know for
sure if Penelope’s teacher knew exactly what day it was, but Ashley had sent
Linda a subpoena to testify against me only a couple of hours from then. I was not sure if the teachers would really
show. I set my drive to the courthouse
to Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown complete with my ringtone for
Ashley, “Know Your Enemy.”
I
was in suit, with my old rolling audit trunk.
I wheeled my green albums, notebooks, legal pads and shrapnel hope
through the metal detector. I met my
lawyer, Martha in the lobby of the courthouse.
We were ready.
400
When
we got into the courtroom, like a perverse classroom desk one side was my
bulldog and the other Ashley and her pincher, ready to snarl at each other for
pay. The attorneys seemed to be friends
as counterparties. The legal-ladies cracked
jokes about other trials zooming through the office storylines. Apparently court gossip included one Nottoway guy who wrapped his house trailer in aluminum
foil to prevent radio waves.
Ashley
had her Nottoway pinstripe New York Yankee lineup with her multimillion dollar
payroll to my Pittsburgh
pirates. Ashley’s attorney and my
attorney chatted like two game managers before the first pitch, conversing
about everything but the day’s events.
We
were the only case on the docket; a full-day, no waiting, just Baker versus
Baker to be decided. Ashley did not look
at me. My parents and her parents were
draped in their country flags and family crests out in the lobby. I added Tim and Conrad to my witness
list. Tim was supposed to drive Conrad
up from New Orleans. Conrad was missing.
I
found out around lunch time Conrad got food poisoning the night before. Conrad being gone made Tim late by ten
minutes. Both were absent for the
initial commencement, which negated their ability to testify for me. I was back to my parents. Anyone testifying had to leave the room, so
the only people besides the judge, the lawyers, the court reporter and Ashley
and I that saw the whole trial were Jeffery and Tim who sat in the audience
silent.
401
This
was family court, division F Osceola Parish.
I was finding out the gender rolled-up differences between courtship and
a courtroom. Certain roles are
assumed. Ashley was on a mission
brimming with sophisticated conceit on her mother highchair to convince her
home town that she was this righteous Amazon.
In
court someone has to be the unfit parent; one to win, one to lose. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be there. Even if one of you is not competing; you are
in a competition. Emotional scars are
not like physical scars. Physical marks
stay the same size on the skin, independent of growth. They are static to the body. Emotional scars can shrink and swell depending
on the waves in time. This was a day
about sizing emotional scars.
Ashley’s
lawyer was a hermaphrodite-sort of Doberman woman; feminine enough externally
to appease the female judge. Ms. Tracey
Trunchbull was set to argue custody of the female minor to her female parent,
but underneath that paired-peach power suit, Trunchbull most certainly had a
dick and balls. Trunchbull was planning
to do some fucking. She was dildo’d up
for this paternal parent. Trunchbull
mobilized in a unit capable of sowing and growing seeds of fruition in one
body. No donor needed.
Arguments
rested in blabbering apparitions of events like bullets in dueling gun
chambers. The ghost gunpowder was mixed
in an oral history chemistry no one could ever validate except Ashley or
me. The only certainty was that this was
happening now in Nottoway. According to Ashley’s parents, brother, chief
of police, town attorney and every kid in every thirty-five person graduating
class from 1989 to 2000, from Nottoway high
school after service time at St. Mark’s elementary Ashley had never done
anything wrong ever. How does one combat
an infallible being?
The
town treated Ashley like a nun, the mayor, a good house keeping Martha Stewart
imClone country-mouse and mother of the year.
Ashley was a volunteer for everything, a selfless community hero of
bake-sale warfare ruling on a porch-throne. Ashley pumped out platitudes to please like a
machinegun. Everyone, but me; I was the
one man Ashley could be honest with everything she would lie to them about.
Ashley
was the most dangerous kind of pathological crazy. Ashley was functioning and appeared exemplary
from a distance. The atmospheric level
of Ashley’s life was a halcyon cloudless azure cerulean blue impeccably
manufactured in what nature would paint in reflective oceanic molecules without
effort. Ashley’s life’s flaws were
explained away in my assigned determents as a trial of endurance advertising
her strengths in a marketing yokel-political campaign so well funded that no
one dare ask the name of the empresses’ fashion designer.
Ashley
preached from a bully-pulpit, pre-informing potential witnesses with the
tranquilizer-dart assumptions of gender to sedate her arachnid endeavors. One by one former faces predisposed to the
sticky confines of her spider web congregated.
Flies for the slaughter, happily consumed in the barter of my ignominy
and the extraction of my daughter in exchange for the guise blanketing Ashley’s
what-if concupiscent deeds and her warped-ascetic mind ready to disparage my
input without qualm.
Ashley’s
gaze was Medusa shepherding the fields of a pastoral hick-town utopia. Ashley’s forest fencing the fields was a
thick boreal labyrinth of assumptions.
No one could identify the timber Ashley used to construct such an
encompassing fortress of solitude, beautiful and perilous; they were all on her
side. I was no Perseus.
Despite
all of that, I felt sorry for her. Her
rage was fueled not from vengeance, but from a sadness dripping from her
frailty. I knew, but courts do not abide
such discussions or peace negotiations built on aiding ones enemy. For any such overtures will be mistrusted as
a Trojan gift. Fear will spoil the crop.
402
Inside
I knew Ashley wept. The taint of husband
still in me could sense her fear. How
many test subjects had been converted in these street pews, these grocery-store
eyeball-shelved witnesses leering at me like a man that must register
notification before establishing inhabitance?
The
danger of two parents eyeing it up on the savannah to the world is raw. As if for a male to fight for the continued
presence of his offspring under the care and concern of his dominion is so anti
the laws of natural order that even human-kind in our ineffectual wisdom has
stimulated and gerrymandered gender cattle-guards to ensure that only the
fittest males can pass what the ovary-bearing female is granted in gratuitous
assumption.
Parents
brawl in a war over predetermined genetic web-workings encoded inside their
child. One side represents the
accentuating mother, the other the father.
The chromosomes are on high alert of appearances and mannerisms slipping
past the fifty point zero-zero-zero one percentage entitlement. Breeching such thresholds wields the power to
extricate the other forty-nine point nine-nine-nine away from the opposing
party and in turn their offspring’s predominant political consciousness.
Child
support laws banked between schedule A and schedule B based on a less than
forty-six percent threshold. If a parent
was at forty-five percent or less, that time equated to basically nothing in
mathematical equations that allowed the other to force the minority partner to
pay exponentially to not see his or her child.
Lawyers would battle over day fifteen out of twenty-eight with lion
teeth ripping the crucial sinew from the savannah bone.
That
marginal day in a child’s schedule was like Jack creeping in to filch the
giant’s golden goose for his mother.
Cloud-realities pit woman against man with the female claiming the
testicular sad-sack fellow only wants the beanstalk to stretch so high to
breach the cumulonimbus-threshold to avoid payments, regardless of the stack of
beans he was sold on his wedding day.
Over
the last nine months Ashley had me complete income and expense affidavits,
credit card statement submissions, and W-2’s to play liars poker. Basically in Louisiana if you do not meet the forty-six
percent threshold, you equate to a deadbeat by using the alternative schedule
intended for sole custody situations.
Ashley made over seventy percent of our income, yet I was the one
dodging Donkey Kong’s barrels coming down the staircase with my daughter on top
behind the ape.
The
money was one thing, the principle another.
My job, my one day I may be able to afford again smaller home, and my
life were shackled to Nottoway to have
Penelope. So be it. This arbitrary diabolical estrogen-oiled
worksheet machine salivating to consume my financial freedom sat there like a
hedge-maze monster. The crux of this
conundrum was another ton to the anvil that hovered above my head.
The
worst thing was if the anvil came down, Penelope was gone. I probably would still live in this
cartoon-town full time for those two nights a month. I was a fractured shell too weak to depart. I knew Ashley did not need the money to
support Penelope, neither of us did. I
use to debate if Ashley even wanted the money.
I figured Ashley just wanted to fuck with me and follow the game plan
she could passively rationalize as what her lawyers told her to do in a Milgram
experiment.
Child
support is lawyer-ammunition. Lawyers
are like nuclear weapons. Once you pull
them out you have already lost. Mine
told me to counter pursue spousal support, which I did contingent on if I had
to pay half the mortgage on top of the rental.
I would have gone bankrupt.
Money
and blood drenched the room in the two extremes of American marital
justice. I prayed before each iteration
of court back in March, June and now September to focus on Penelope, not fear
and not funding. I tried to envision the
best-case scenario for our family. Judge
Wolfe, the genuine ringmaster arrived.
We all stood.
We
were the Dutch versus the Cajun French on a Gettysburg
civil war battlefield locked in Louisiana. Each of Ashley’s subpoena-sheep was a
weapon. Some were M11’s. Others were
Lupara shotguns. Ashley was the
Howitzer. I knew at some point Ashley
was going to send me up there to try to suck on the barrel of a blunderbuss.
403
Ashley
put the secretary of Penelope’s school Lucy Jones at leadoff hitter. Penelope’s teachers came in a rotation
through the day so the school would not be understaffed. Thank goodness our daughter’s education would
not be hindered by Ashley’s summons.
Thank goodness the judge announced she knew all the teachers so well
since her kids went to the same school.
Thank goodness.
Ms.
Jones talked about how I did not talk to her enough and seemed “weird I
guess.” Lucy did not understand why I
had asked to meet with her and the other teachers after the orientation a few
weeks ago.
Written to me: June 17, 2009: (They have concerns
about Ethan’s parenting ability and his constant failure to participate in
school activities, Mental state.)
Mental
state was printed as a psychological evaluation from kindergarten
teachers. Only in a family courtroom
could a man shudder at these Kumbaya ex-hippie-led candle snuffers. If psyche-assessments negated parental rites
we’d be a billion-member Price is Right audience of orphans.
Trunchbull
– Can you describe the school events each year?
Ms Jones-Sock Hop, Fall Festival, Winter Solstice,
Mardi Gras, May Day, graduation.
Trunchbull
–Do you recall seeing Ashley Baker at those events?
Ms. Jones-Oh, every one.
Trunchbull
– Do you recall seeing Ethan Baker there?
Ms. Jones – At the Father’s Day
Picnic usually.
Trunchbull-Did
Mr. Baker have a conversation with you after orientation this year?
Ms. Jones – He met with the teachers after. He was basically saying he was a good
father. I was uncomfortable. He brought albums of pictures of him and
Penelope. I did not look at them. Mr. Baker cried and then got better.
On
cross, my attorney asked the secretary of my daughter’s school if she had any
idea what had been represented to me from Ashley about what the teachers
intended. Lucy Jones said, “No.”
How
could those mental state concerns make sense?
Sure, anti-social was maxed out on my cranial credit card. Bullet holes build character. Penelope’s daddy was still standing. Perfection tastes like a
vanilla-lard-gasoline latte. Kids need
USDA monitored water with grit questions of what the fuck is in this cup, not
Starbucks.
Lucy
did not even know me or what I was going through, yet was willing to espouse on
uncomfortable air and Ashley’s four-year perfect attendance record. How dare we stare humanity in the eye before
we are ready? Lucy was the first swing
of the bat.
404
Second
up was Ashley in her pink power suit of passive aggressive vitriol and little
make-up. Ashley seemed cold and
broken. Ashley was consistent, but not
sturdy in her bombastic sermon. The
script Ashley wrote in her discovery information was like an unbroken text
bullet-point list for her talking points.
She seemed primed to let her Gatling gun of spinning words fly after
standing up as the Athena-mom Ashley believed she was; perfect as her parents
told her.
Ashley
talked about her pregnancy and how uninvolved I was. The menagerie of painted wood animals on the
chair rail was muzzled. Ashley was proud
of all the books she read and how I refused to read them. Ashley said Penelope would scream and flail
her legs when I tried to change her diapers.
Little did Ashley know I did DNA testing and fingerprint analysis to
find over four-hundred of Penelope’s old diapers still yet to decompose in the New Orleans landfill to
prove who was really shoveling the shit.
I
did not participate in Penelope’s life.
Even when I got up in the middle of the night Ashley calmed Penelope
with her Vulcan mind-powers during R.E.M. sleep, while I rocked our
daughter.
Ashley
said she tried to cover up “who I really was” to the rest of the family for
years. Ashley contended every supportive
display of my beneficial qualities as Penelope’s father, were actually counter
measures of positive reinforcement to get me to change past all my horrible
deficiencies.
After
Katrina I was cast as a font of apocalyptic revelations where the Beast of the
Earth was calling out the star of Wormwood with seven angelic trumpets that New Orleans was going to
hell. I handcuffed myself to the
generator run television gaping at the thousands dead that only I could see.
I
never researched the preschools. I did
not bring Penelope to the doctor. Worst
of all after my obsession with the Simpsons was cured; I played Magic the
Gathering and Fantasy Football. Holy
Fuck Batman, arrest this man!
405
Ashley
let out a barrage of bullet claims.
Ashley did everything for Penelope.
Ashley constantly asked me to change and get help. Ashley constantly threatened to divorce me
over this. Pop. Pop. Pop, where’s the
blood?
Trunchbull-
What efforts, if any, did Ethan contribute to the research and discussion about
the Montessori School of North Dallas?
Ashley – Very little.
It was never his interest. I’m
the one who visited the school and signed her up and enrolled her. I brought her that first day.
Trunchbull
– Did you have a special routine on Friday nights?
Ashley – Every Friday night, save a few, Ethan plays a
game called Magic. Penelope and I would
go to the mall and play with other kids and go to kid-themed restaurants. He would obsess over it. First it was the Simpsons, then Magic. He would leave at five-thirty and be out past
midnight.
Trunchbull
- Six months in Dallas
what happened?
Ashley - I agreed to move, and yes we did, yes. I was homesick. I missed my parents, his parents, our
brothers, everyone. I was very
lonely. Ethan worked for a big CPA
firm. He traveled a lot. So just not knowing anyone, or having any
friends, or family, it was just Penelope and I.
We talked about it and Ethan agreed to move to Nottoway.
We purchased a lot a few blocks from my parent’s
house. We were supposed to stay with my
parents for a little while. That ended
up being two years. Ethan was very
concerned about financial stability. So
he didn’t want to rent a place. Ethan
chose, and preferred to stay with my parents.
Oh,
I preferred to house with her hovering mother and alcoholic-autocratic
father? Oh, and I must have preferred to
keep paying on a Katrina house and saving up $640,000 for her porch-Antebellum
dollhouse with my salary just cut in half to move to Nottoway. Oh those two fiduciary wonderlands were all
my idea. Oh, let me dip my forearm in
gasoline and fist my ass. Here’s a
match, light my arm hair. Living with
your parents is my fetish. Maybe I can
lick the shit off after and pretend it’s chocolate.
406
Trunchbull-Describe
a typical weekend once you moved back into your parent’s?
Ashley –It was pretty much the same as in Dallas. Friday night was Magic, so Penelope and I
would do something fun together. My mom
would come, my brother, my dad, my brother’s wife. It got bigger and bigger. We’d go out to eat Chucky Cheese.
On Saturday’s I took Penelope to gymnastics, birthday
parties, play dates, the zoo, the aquarium, the Children’s Museum, Global
Wildlife. We are a member at all of
them. Ethan would come sometimes, but it
was always Penelope and me.
Sunday in football season, Ethan watched football all
day and on Saturday. He is
obsessed. He watches all the games pro
and college and maybe even a little bit on high school because they’re going to
feed college, which feeds the NFL.
Trunchbull-During
the time you were living in your parent’s house describe the interaction with
Ethan and Penelope?
Ashley- Very little. When we lived there, my mom and
Penelope have a very close relationship.
They probably next to me, her, and my mom are very close to one
another. Ethan would watch T.V. Penelope played with my mom.
Ethan is more the disciplinarian. He’s very demanding, strict. His words are harsh. When he speaks nicely to her it is after he’s
broken her down after a huge knock-down, drag-out fight and she can barely
breathe. He talks down to her like a
baby, like a child.
Trunchbull-
Does that concern you?
Ashley –Yes, very much. I talk to her like an adult. I treat her like a child. I explain things. It concerns me that they don’t have a strong
relationship.
Trunchbull
-In May of 2008, where did y’all move to?
Ashley - That’s when we had finished building our new
house a few blocks away.
Trunchbull-
Is that where you’re still residing?
Ashley - I am now.
In December, about mid-December when we had talked about divorce, he had
asked me to leave, and so Penelope and I went to live with my mom. In May we filed to move back into the house,
and he moved out.
“Talked
about divorce, asked her to leave;” the word divorce never came up, not
once. No pleas, no major complaints, no
arguments, change or perish speeches.
Hell, there was no speech, because Ashley does not discuss her
problems. Ashley lip-sticked a smile for
the world. Maybe it was that behind
closed door thing she grew up with Hilton.
December 15, 2008, came. A board
meeting was called. The D-word was not uttered. The canvas Ashley email-approved a few weeks
before hung on the dining room wall.
The
idea that I asked Ashley to leave is Ashley’s complete psychological rejection
of our marriage. When Ashley said this
in her mind she was not lying. The
scariest part is that Ashley did and actually does believe herself. (If one wanders far enough into the external
moment, one never has to leave the immediate; and therefore the ramifications
of what one says never find their way into the accountancy of recollection.)
407
Prior
to the time that you were separated, did Mr. Baker every read Penelope a story
at night, or lay down with her and talk to her about her day?
Ashley- I think, yeah. There would be occasion where
he would read her a story.
On Tuesday nights, I help some friends with their
accounting work. He opened his new
business and for free I go and help him.
He’s been a life-long friend, a friend of Ethan’s as well. I’m usually home by eight o’clock, but there
were occasions where I wasn’t. Then it
would be Ethan’s responsibility to bathe her and read her a story. A lot of times, I would come home and she
wouldn’t have taken a bath. She’d still
be in her clothes. But yes on those
occasions he would go to the library, check out books and they would read
together.
Ethan and Penelope’s relationship has always been very
strained. I have always been involved
with libraries. I volunteered in high
school everyday at lunch. I suggested
they go. To me it was a public place
where you couldn’t lose your temper and yell.
You were forced to be together calmly.
To
ever be the man bringing Penelope to the doctor, giving her a bath, performing
any task that could in any way be completed by mommy-juggernaut martyr Ashley;
I would have had to have a court order.
My
only chances were when Ashley was sequestered by an employment task for some
other father figure. There was never a
moment of encouragement to share those tasks after Dallas.
In my exhaustion from icy trips to the New Mexico desert and the reprieve of
something post-Katrina normal in Friday night Magic I was usurped as a father
and apparently lost my wife.
I
saw my capability from being on my own.
Ashley repressed my offerings.
She spun my anti-social crutches against me in court. Those Tuesday night’s Ashley was supposed to
be home by six-thirty for us to eat dinner together. I fixed her plate. There was no plan of hours. Tracer came to the house once, but there was
no Ashley library suggestion. I was
already bringing Penelope to the library.
Library night was why Ashley picked Tuesday as the day to help Tracer
with Ben. Now I did not even have dibs
on libraries.
I
would call Ashley’s cell phone and like most of my calls Ashley would not
answer. Ashley would not even listen to
the messages I left on her voicemail.
Ashley would eventually see that I called and respond at her leisure with
a, “What’s up?”
There
was no commitment to be home at a certain time, only an understanding in my
head, which was far different than the one in Ashley’s. Penelope and I sat on the couch reading
stories listening for the Dutch door on pins.
Penelope would get excited waiting for Ashley. Time drifted into instability.
I
would find out Ashley ate dinner with Tracer and Ben hours later. We were in the new house transitioning from
Lacey’s bathroom to Penelope’s own. My
assertive gonads were still in the battery charger. I should have usurped and given Penelope her
bath, told Penelope, “Mommy is coming later,” and put Penelope to bed on my own
from the start.
Eventually
I did put Penelope to bed on those nights, but we would usually skip bath. With all the change Penelope had been
through, I felt feeble to hurdle the bath time mental-necessity for mommy
Penelope had in her head on my own, especially not with Penelope looking around
the corner every other second for a straggling traveler. Penelope was not ready. Ashley never helped Penelope or I transition,
because Ashley did not want us to transition.
On
one hand Ashley clung to every measure of control over our child and with the
other she demonized me for not doing more.
Sister fingers of Cain and Able.
Ashley liked that Penelope needed her.
Ashley got off on it. Where the
fuck was my life partner?
408
Trunchbull
– Do you have a custody schedule to suggest?
Ashley- Ethan would have Penelope every other weekend
nine a.m. to Monday morning to school and visits after school on Tuesdays, but
she would come home before bath time.
Trunchbull-
What have you observed about Penelope’s behavior under the current schedule?
Ashley – Penelope is reluctant to leave on
weekends. She hides under the sofa and
finds excuses, something she forgot to pack that she absolutely can not leave
the house without. When she returns she
is very clingy to me. Over time I have
seen Penelope improve quite a bit.
Trunchbull
– Do you recognize Exhibit Number 3?
Ashley-It is my check stub from
Winfield Enterprises.
Trunchbull
– It says $62,377, through September 15, 2009 is that correct? Does it contain
every penny that you have earned?
Ashley – Yes
The
court called a smoke, bathroom, Coke break.
I was at the pisser next to Hilton.
I stared into the urine pondering the handy-work consequences of my unit
playing out today rather than Hilton’s gruff.
Ashley was droning her damndest to paint a picture.
The
first money-shot spit-wad for cash and Schedule B went up on the stall-door
like a “call here for a good time” number.
I knew Ashley made way more money than whatever that paper said Ashley
said it said. That was the kind of day
this was, even two people reading the same piece of paper could come to
segregated conclusions.
409
Cross
Examination Martha Bertrand
Martha-
In reference to Exhibit Number 3, you refer to the sum of $62,377. In fact rather than $62,377, your actual
gross income for 2009 as of September 20, 2009 is in excess of $89,000? Is this correct?
Ashley-Yes the net is $62,000?
Martha
– Is this $11,080 profit sharing?
Ashley –Yes
Martha
– I heard some testimony from Ms. Jones earlier at the Pine Montessori
School that you told them
you didn’t want any child support from Ethan.
Is this correct?
Ashley-I heard her say that.
Martha,
- I’m going to presume that because this is being introduced into evidence that
you are no longer of the position that you don’t want child support from Ethan;
is that correct?
Ashley-That is something that I never asked for,
no. I am comfortable without it. I am
fine without it.
In
one swoop of playing to Ashley’s white-gown ego with dancing double-negatives,
Martha laid this monetary-Sisyphus boulder weight from being anchored to my Nottoway nut-sack.
Surely Ashley had talked to the teachers at Penelope’s school to assure
them this was not about money. Why was
this paystub presented? Narcissism and
pride trumped greed and wrath. Although
if she had asked, I would have had to pay; justice is often a flavored
technicality. I could feel my wallet in
my pant pocket celebrating its own Cinco de Mayo. Puppet King Maximilian, fuck that French
debt.
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