The yellow envelope from the county court sat directly on top of my plan for the cherry sideboard, right where the wood glue had dripped and dried into a hard amber bubble.
Diane stood by the edge of my workbench, her fingers drumming against her leather briefcase. Ezoic “They filed it at four yesterday,” Diane said, her voice sharp and rapid. “The emergency hearing is set for nine this morning.” Ezoic She adjusted her thin metal glasses,
pushing them up her nose with one quick finger before pointing at the certified blue folder of inspection receipts that I had laid out next to my chisels. Ezoic “Is the loft ready?” she asked.
“I finished the third set of bunk beds last night,” I said. Ezoic I rubbed the faint traces of sawdust from my calloused knuckles, looking down at the workbench. My fingers were still stiff from hours of sanding the oak frames, but the cedar scent in the room usually made me feel settled. Today, it offered no comfort at all. “The building inspector has not signed off on the fire-rated drywall yet,” Diane said. “Without that certificate, the court is going to look at this place as an active commercial carpentry business, not a residential home.” Ezoic “It has a full kitchen,”
I said, my voice quiet. “And the kids will have their own rooms.” “You are a single thirty-four-year-old carpenter trying to take in five siblings,” she said. “The county does not like single applicants,
Carter. They like married couples with suburban backyards.” Ezoic She reached down to open her briefcase, and as she moved, her sleeve brushed against my open metal toolbox.
Inside, resting on top of my socket wrenches, was a small red plastic toy truck. It was scratched along the wheels, the plastic faded from years of sitting in a drawer.
I reached out and pushed the drawer of the toolbox shut with a sharp click. “We have twenty minutes to get to the courthouse,” Diane said. “Bring the blue folder anyway.” Ezoic I took my denim jacket off the peg by the door and stepped outside,
locking the heavy oak door behind us. The air smelled of wood shavings and wet asphalt, and the sky was a flat, heavy gray.
The county courthouse smelled of lemon furniture polish and stale, burnt coffee. My work boots made a dull, heavy thud on the terrazzo floor as we walked down the long, narrow corridor toward room twelve.
Margaret, the family court clerk, was standing behind the high counter at the end of the hall. She was smoothing her dark wool skirt with both hands, her face carrying the quiet weariness of a woman who had watched fifty families break apart every week for thirty years.
“Sign in on the yellow pad, Carter,” Margaret said, her voice a warm, raspy whisper. “The judge is already in chambers with the state’s attorney.”
“Is Daniel in there?” Diane asked.
“He went in five minutes ago,” Margaret said, nodding toward the heavy double doors at the end of the hall. “He brought three separate case files with him.”
I gripped the blue folder tighter against my chest.
“Why three files?” I asked.
Margaret looked at me, then looked down at her sign-in sheet, her fingers smoothing the paper.
“You should talk to your lawyer,” she said.
I turned toward the row of wooden benches lining the opposite wall. The five children were sitting in a neat, quiet line under the high windows. Eli, the oldest at six, sat in the middle, holding his three-year-old sister Lila’s hand.
Eli was clutching a faded pink hair ribbon in his free hand, his fingers twisting the satin fabric over and over.
“We stayed in the car for a long time,” Eli whispered when I walked over to the bench. “Lila didn’t like the noise.”
“It is quiet in here,” I said, crouching down so I was at his eye level.
Lila did not look up. She was holding a battered plush rabbit with one missing ear, pressing the dirty gray fabric against her cheek.
I have some apple juice in my bag if she gets thirsty,” I said to Eli.
“She wants to go to the big room with the chairs,” Eli said, his voice dropping to a protective whisper. “She thinks they have the red truck there.”
I looked at his small, serious face, and then at Lila’s rabbit.
“We are going to do our best to get you into the workshop tonight,” I said.
Diane caught my elbow, pulling me back toward the courtroom entrance. Daniel, the state’s attorney, had just stepped out of the judge’s chambers. He was a tall man of forty-five with a clinical detachment that showed in the way he stood, perfectly straight, adjusting his blue silk tie before he spoke.
“Mr. Carter,” Daniel said, his voice a flat, clear monotone. “We have a structural issue with your petition.”
“The home is safe,” I said. “I am finishing the renovations this week.”
“The state cannot keep five children in a temporary shelter while you complete construction,” Daniel said. “The regulations are very clear on physical safety standards.”
“They are together now,” I said.
Daniel looked down at his clipboard, his pen tracing a line on the top document.
“We are looking at three different counties by Friday afternoon,” Daniel said.
“Three counties?” I asked. “They are siblings. They belong in one house.”
“There is no single foster placement in Oak Creek certified for five children,” Daniel said. “We have two spaces in Clark County, two in Greene, and the youngest will go to a specialized infant home in Montgomery.”
I looked at the five children sitting across the hall, and the air in my lungs turned to ice.
The county car was still idling in my gravel driveway when Beverly walked into my kitchen, her black boots leaving damp, gray smudges on the pine floor. She did not take off her heavy wool coat, though the radiator in the corner was already clanking with evening steam.
She pulled open the double cabinet doors under the sink, where I kept the copper plumbing joints and three cans of solvent. She did not bend her knees, instead leaning from the waist with her blue clipboard held flat against her chest.
“No childproof latches on any of these lower drawers,” she said, her voice dropping into a flat, bureaucratic register.
I rubbed a faint trace of cedar sawdust from my calloused knuckle, watching her write on her forms. “I have the brass magnetic latches in my toolbox, Beverly. It takes ten minutes to screw them into the stiles.”
“The latches are the least of your concerns tonight,” she said.
She walked toward the high rafters, pointing her silver pen at the exposed copper wiring running along the central support beam. The wood smelled of fresh oil and cedar, a scent I had spent five years putting into the walls, but she did not seem to notice.
“A workspace is not a home, Mr. Carter, no matter how much cedar you use,” she said.
“The r-value is thirty-eight in the ceiling,” I said, my voice steady despite the tightness in my chest. “The children will not be cold.”
“The state code for five foster children requires a three-hour fire-rated drywall separation between any active workshop and the residential quarters,” she said, turning a page on her clipboard. “And that partition must have self-closing, solid-core doors with steel frames.”
I looked at the open floor plan where my table saw sat under its gray canvas shroud, the iron table cold and quiet. “That is eighty feet of wall.”
“The final safety inspection is in exactly three weeks,” she said, finally looking me in the eye.
“I can frame that wall by Friday,” I said.
Beverly peeled a yellow carbon copy from her clipboard and laid it on the clean oak countertop, her fingers lingering on the paper. “If the county building inspector does not sign off on the structural separation by the morning of the hearing, the state will deny the placement immediately.”
“I will get the permit tomorrow morning,” I said.
“You also need five separate beds, each with five inches of clearance from any heating register,” she said, her hand resting on the brass latch of the front door.
“I have the oak for the bunk beds stacked in the dry kiln,” I said.
She opened the door, letting in the cold night air and the smell of wet gravel from the driveway. “A framed wall is not an approved wall, Mr. Carter. You have twenty-one days to prove this place can keep them alive.”
The lawyer’s office smelled of stale chicory coffee and old yellow legal pads when I arrived at eight the next morning. Diane did not look up when I sat down, her thin metal glasses sliding down her nose as she sorted through a thick manila folder.
“Daniel’s office just sent over the pre-hearing disclosure,” she said, tapping her finger on a wide gray grid. “The state’s attorney is already drafting a motion to dismiss our petition before we even get to the judge.”
I leaned forward, my work boots squeaking against her linoleum floor. “On what grounds?”
“Your background check,” she said, turning the folder toward me. “They ran your social security number through the national database, Carter. You have a clean record from age eighteen to thirty-four, but there is a nine-year hole before that.”
“I was in the state system,” I said.
“There are no school records, no foster home placements, and no medical files from the time you turned nine until your eighteenth birthday,” she said.
I looked out the window at the gray brick facade of the hardware store across the street, where a delivery truck was unloading a pallet of shingles.
“The county records building in Columbus burned down in the late nineties,” I said, my voice dropping. “Everybody knows those files were lost.”
Diane leaned back in her leather chair, her pen resting on her lip. “Daniel is going to argue that we cannot verify your childhood environment. He wants to claim you have an unverified history.”
“I survived those years,” I said. “That should be enough to show I can take care of them.”
“In a family court, silence is a black hole,” Diane said. “The judge will want to know why the state has no record of where you slept for nearly a decade.”
She circled the empty grid with a red pen, the ink bleeding through the cheap paper.
“I need you to find something from those years,” she said. “A report card, a dental record, even an old library card with your name on it.”
“There is nothing,” I said.
“Then the state’s attorney will argue that your lack of verifiable history makes you a high-risk placement,” she said. “He is preparing a motion based on your lack of formal parenting experience, and he will use these blank years to back it up.”
“Let him file his motion,” I said. “I have eighty sheets of drywall to hang.”
