Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (20 page)

I take a deep breath, let it out, then inhale again. I try a simple mantra from my recent efforts at meditation.
Breathing in long, she discerns that she is breathing in long. Breathing out long, she discerns that she is breathing out long
.

“Um, okay,” I say, taking in another breath, then exhaling again. “Well. So. Today is kind of a sad but important day.”

Three sets of eyes stare right into mine, interested now despite the early hour. I don’t do hesitancy, ever, at least not in front of them.

Breathe in, exhale.

If there were a Mardi mantra, it would go something like this:
Get on with it, you gutless wonder. Rip off that Band-Aid
. Repeat as necessary. But after another breath, I just blurt it out.

“Today is the divorce hearing. Today I’ll go in front of a judge and he’ll sign some papers from the lawyers and it will make everything official. After today, your dad and I won’t be married anymore. We’ll still be your parents, but we’ll be divorced.”

And then I do exactly what you’re not supposed to do during meditation; I brace myself and hold my breath. I don’t know what kind of reaction I’m expecting from them, but the boys just look at me for a moment, blink, and say nothing.

“Do you want to ask me anything about it?” I prompt.

Whatever sting I’ve expected is not forthcoming, though, and so instead of feeling relieved, I know right down to my anxious core that I deserve their wrath, their anger, or at least their disappointment in me, and I even have some pathological need to receive it.

Since not one of them offers this up freely, or immediately, I do my best to pry it out of them.

“Do you want to share how you feel?” I ask.

I am not unrewarded for my efforts this time. Owen stands up, shoves his stool in, and stomps upstairs.

“If you guys cared about your kids you wouldn’t be doing this!” he shouts.

Luke follows quickly behind, his slim form soundless on the stairs next to Owen’s pounding, not looking at me and saying nothing. He is the middle child off to do what he does best, make peace.

Will remains at the counter, frowning. I know this look. It’s not an angry frown, it’s an inquiring frown, a frown that means he’s trying to figure something out.

“Mom?” he asks finally, lifting his head from where he’s been resting it on his crossed arms. “Does everybody get their own lawyer
when they’re born? ’Cause I don’t know who mine is, and what happens if I need ’im?”

He thinks that a conflict like the one between his father and me is a foregone conclusion. That this is what’s in store for him: You grow up, you get married, you lawyer up, you get divorced.

If I had been standing, this lob of friendly fire would have cut me clean in half, but I’m sitting on an upholstered chrome counter stool directly across from him, trying to breathe, my midsection protected by kitchen cabinets.

“Lawyer is a job,” I tell him, exhaling in a voice as even as I can make it. “Just like teacher or bus driver.”

“Ohhhh,” he says, and as this new concept crystalizes, the frown disappears.

“And if you play your cards right, maybe you won’t ever need one.”

“Well,” he says, grabbing the strap of his backpack, “I only know Go Fish and Concentration, but Big Grandpa said he was going to teach me solitaire.”

“Not with a Club, the Heart is broken / Nor with a Stone,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “A Whip so small you could not see it / I’ve known.”

Monday afternoon my whipped heart and I sit inside a courtroom at the Grand Traverse County Courthouse and I don’t even bother and try to breathe. This is the moment I’ve been alternately wishing for and dreading for the last nine months.

My divorce lawyer is going over some paperwork with me. We’re sitting at the back of the courtroom on a long wooden bench that resembles a church pew while up front the judge dispenses
with the ruins of another woman’s marriage. She is eighty years old if she’s a day. At least I’m not her.

And then it’s my turn, and the temporary custody arrangement Mr. Wonderful and I have been observing these last six months is made official and our possessions are divided. The one wrinkle is that my main form of transportation, our green minivan, will go to him. I’ll be left with just the farm truck, which has only three seat belts, but I’ll worry about that later. The good news is that I still have a shot at owning the Big Valley.

The judge gives me ninety days to refinance the farm in my name only. If I can’t find a bank loony enough to lend me the money, I’ll have to sell it, but this is not even an option in my world. Approaching a loan shark is an option. Joining a multilevel marketing scheme is an option. Selling twigs and berries on the Internet is an option. Ding-dong-Avon-calling is an option. My sons and I living anywhere but in our farmhouse together is not going to happen. I will find the money.

I wait for the gavel strike, but that is just a symptom of watching too many episodes of
Law & Order
. It never comes. Instead, the judge lifts his head from behind a stack of paperwork and takes off his Clark Kent–style eyeglasses.

“Good luck to you, miss,” he says. It is only five words but he means them. Regardless of how many women he said these words to yesterday, or will say them to tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, when he says them to me I can tell he really means them.

It’s the purely nicest thing a complete stranger will say to me all day, and maybe ever. He is not Clark Kent after all, he is Superman, his black robe a cape. That I feel such a huge pulse of gratitude for this small kindness only illustrates how alone I really am.

Exactly three months shy of my twentieth wedding anniversary, my marriage is severed.

Outside the courtroom I am heading for the stairway and home when I hear a familiar voice. It’s coming from way down the hall and it rises above all the other voices in this high-ceilinged space and somehow cuts straight through the crowd and directly to my ear.

I like this voice, but wonder if it is an auditory mirage. Because it’s Pete’s voice I hear. And what would he be doing here?

“What are you
doing
here?” I ask him. He sees me but his smile doesn’t disappear, it just grows wider as he lowers his head a little and shakes it slowly back and forth.

“My divorce,” he answers.

“What?”
I ask.

“My divorce is today, too. Right now. Any minute, actually.”

I had been paying at least some attention to the woman whose divorce was immediately before mine, but haven’t given one thought to whose divorce would come afterward. Strangely, this is like my fear of death, but in reverse. I worry about what will happen to my soul after I die, but give little thought to what it was doing before I was born.

On the wall is a locked document case that displays the day’s courtroom schedule. Pete points at it. With my index finger leaving a sweaty, snail-like smear on the glass, I run down the day. There’s “Mardi Jo Link vs. Mr. Wonderful,” and right below it, “Pete vs. Mrs. Pete.”

Each divorce hearing from 9:00 a.m. through 5:30 p.m. is listed by full name in twenty-minute increments on this schedule.
More than two dozen cases, and that’s just for this one day. Somehow in this crazy and timeless universe, in this town of fourteen thousand, in this county of more than fifty thousand, where umpteen irreconcilable couples get divorced every year, Pete’s divorce hearing and mine are scheduled in the same courtroom, in front of the same judge, one right after the other.

How is this even possible?

Coincidence, said Einstein, is God’s way of remaining anonymous. I’m beginning to think this sockless, timeless mathematician might be onto something after all, because the very system designed to pull people apart is going against everything it stands for and inexplicably flinging Pete and me together.

In this moment of perfect earthly rotation, of serendipity, of good karma and divine providence all occurring on a day that should probably go down as one of the worst days of both in our lives, what do I manage to say to him? What pithy verbal response do I have to the fist of fate reaching down and clutching the two of us in its strong fingers and thrusting us together? What do I say to the man somebody up there somewhere thinks could be my destiny?

“Oh.”

Do I sit down and wait for him? No. Do I smooth my skirt under my clenched behind and wait on the bench so I’ll be the first friendly female face he sees after he officially becomes a single man again? No, I do not.

Instead, I run for the hills. For the stairs, for my doomed minivan, and for home. Romantic love doesn’t exist for women like me. Time doesn’t exist for anyone. And I need another man like Einstein needed a pocket watch.

Once through the door, I totter to my flowered chair, curl up,
and snivel and sleep until the sound of the air brakes on the first of the school buses that will stop at the end of our driveway penetrates my stupor at four o’clock. Because our driveway is so long I’ve got a minute or two between when the school-bus doors open and the kids bust inside, and I’m at the sink splashing water on my face by the time Luke and Owen walk in the door.

“Hi, guys!” I sing, certain I’m presenting the face of a happy, albeit dripping, mother to them, the face of a woman to whom nothing much out of the ordinary has happened to today, or happens to any day. A mom focused on the second that her children will finally be home from school and the meaning in her life will resume.

I’ve already told them that the divorce hearing was today, they don’t need a play-by-play of how it went. And, to be honest, I don’t feel like talking to them about it ever again. I just want it behind us.

“How was school?” I chirp, as the boys walk out of the mudroom and into the kitchen, where I’m rummaging through cupboards for their after-school snack.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” Luke asks.

Now that I think about it, they do feel a little swollen. And they’re burning, which means they’re also bloodshot. I have Irish eyes. Big, brown, and tender. A couple good teardrops from way down deep can swell them half shut like they’ve been bee-stung.

“Remember?” Owen says before I can answer. “We’re the divorced kids now.”

Spring has got to be around here somewhere. I feel like I can’t take one more second of winter, of cold, of darkness, of endings. And so, regardless of what the thermometer says, three days before Easter I have the boys pull our old metal porch furniture out of the garage. They wash the caked-on dirt and crispy ladybug shells off with a bucket of hot, soapy water and then arrange the chairs and the matching table on the porch.

It is an unseasonably warm evening, maybe forty degrees, bright and clear, and when I take a deep breath, the air is still cold but it really does smell like spring. Like bird nests and crocus blooms and dirt thawing out. Like fresh starts.

Everywhere there is the sound of dripping. Snow from eaves, ice from tree branches, snowbanks melting into the pond. Our driveway is completely clear and the low-in-the-sky sunshine slowly dries the porch chairs off. Even though it is still too cold to sit outside, I bundle up in a blanket and do it anyway.

This vintage purple porch set once belonged to my grandma Link, she of the Emergency Steak and the blood sausage and the Lutheran resolve. After her husband, my grandfather, died, she lived another three decades alone, and about this time of year she would grab these chairs single-handedly, ham-fisting them out of her garage, wipe them down, and set them up in her driveway. Whatever resourcefulness I have, I probably owe at least some of it to her. She taught me self-reliance through her actions, not her words, though I didn’t always realize it at the time.

Because when you’re twelve years old and you go stay with your recently widowed grandmother for a week in the summer, and she tells you that the scrumptious “fried chicken” you’ve just downed a whole plate of is actually a fat rabbit—maybe wild, maybe someone’s escaped pet—that she caught that day in her backyard, skinned, disemboweled, and dropped, piece by floured piece, into boiling lard, “Wow! Isn’t Grandma resourceful?” is not the first thing that pops into your head.

But in these first few days of spring, putting healthy food on our table is still a challenge for me. It was probably a challenge for her, too, I just didn’t realize it. Remembering my grandma Link so clearly today has made me wonder if, even beyond those “Meat-Stretchers” in her old cookbook, we are missing out on another food source. I shun lard, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t bring myself to kill and dress a rabbit, even the ones
who wiggle into the garden, but could I wring a chicken’s neck? Maybe.

Even if I can’t stomach plucking and gutting one, if we had our own flock of chickens at least we’d have fresh and free eggs. That’d be one way to replace the protein from Rocky. No killer instinct is required to scramble, poach, fry, or boil.

And so on Easter Sunday, when the Congregational church we are visiting sings a rousing version of “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” I decide something important. The boys and I are going to try raising chickens. That hymn is probably supposed to inspire thoughts more pious than poultry, but an inspiration is an inspiration, even if mine comes with chicken feathers instead of angel wings.

Tractor Supply, the farm store a few miles south of us, is closed on Easter, and it’s almost a week until I have time to get there on the following Saturday. I am a regular customer here, as regular as my budget allows, carting out dog food, soil thermometers, garden gloves, and mole traps. This is where I used to buy Rocky’s hog chow and where I used to buy Major and Pepper’s horse dewormer.

A department store for farmers the week after Easter is an unlikely place to experience a spiritual revelation. But after all of my Buddhist reading and our sporadic church visiting, I do know how precious spiritual moments are in my everyday life. If one arrives in the livestock department at Tractor Supply, well then, so be it.