Wednesday Morning

by Kailyn Kausen

Evie, 12, 2022

You are 12, and it’s 7 am, and you are pouring Coco Puffs and chocolate milk into a bowl when the doorbell rings. Some lady you’ve never seen before is at the door, asking for your mom. It’s early. You wear black plaid pajama pants and a giant black sweatshirt. You never answer the door, but you do this time because nobody else is up.

“Hello?” you say.

Image credit: 林生 黄 on Unsplash

The lady on the other side of the glass doors has a stern expression and her hair is in a ponytail. She looks like she could be a neighbor, or one of your mom’s friends, or a woman trying to make it in an MLM.

“Is Janette Kausen here?”

“Um, yes…?”

“Can you get her?”

You go to her room and find her in front of the sink, eyes still puffy with sleep. When you tell your mom that someone is asking for her, her face goes tight. “I bet I’m being served.”

You follow her back to the front door, but you stay a few steps behind because you are in your pajamas. You pick up your white chihuahua, so he stops growling at this stranger, despite the part of you that wants him to keep barking, to show that she is not welcome here.

You know all this started one night ten months ago, when your dad chose to leave, driving away while you were at soccer practice. You, your thirteen-year-old sister, and mom didn’t think anything of his missing truck, so he texted your mom while she was in the shower—Did you notice I left?

Your mom, at first, fought for him. He’d been on dating apps before, tried to leave before. She thought twenty-seven years of marriage and four kids would win. But this time, he stayed in a hotel, waiting for his lease on a rental to begin, and wouldn’t meet with her to talk it out, calling her a siren.

With court and child support, he gave her much less than she thought necessary to support you and your sister. She appealed to his mother—Look at these figures. Don’t you think these numbers are valid? Please, he won’t listen to me. His mother filed a restraining order—She threatened me. There’s damage on the corner of that barstool, from her slamming it into the ground.

Your mother appealed to the courts—Going off his paycheck isn’t sufficient. We lived above our means, using money from the Ranch. He could make it look like he makes one dollar a month if he wanted to screw me more than he is. They play travel soccer and it’s expensive and that shouldn’t be taken from them because he decided to leave.

The lady at the door hands your mother a yellow envelope.

The wind stirs the leaves outside, and you can hear them fluttering where the dew and mist haven’t stuck them to the ground. You look up to the right of the entryway, where, before all of this, above the piano, there was a canvas with your last name and words like family and love, but it isn’t there anymore.

The door closes.

Your mom opens the envelope, and it's exactly what she thought.

The lawsuit your mom had told you could send her to prison for twenty-six years, apparently desired by your grandmother, has now been filed and will be on her record forever. It’s the lawsuit that will silence her, to stop her asking for more.

You take the dog with you back upstairs with the bowl of Coco Puffs. You sit on the grey rug at the foot of your bed, holding the dog tight. Then you get up, throw on a bra and brush your teeth and curl your curtain bangs and swipe on mascara. The Coco Puffs turn soggy in the bowl.

There have been so many lies, so much blame whispered in your ears from all sides, that you don’t know who to trust anymore. You don’t know if you should trust this lawsuit like you would’ve in times past, believing that the law only listens to the truth, or if you should believe your mom, who says the lawsuit is just leverage against her to make her sign the divorce papers from your dad’s attorney. Your dad says that she will take down the entire Ranch with what she’s asking, insisting nine thousand a month is a deal other single moms would die for. Your mom argues she isn’t other moms, that she will be in debt forever, that she’s been out of the workforce for too long, that she has nothing in retirement, that he stopped her from going to school, and wasn’t twenty-seven years of marriage worth something?

Over the next few days, the milk in your cereal bowl will dry out, leaving melted Coco Puffs trapped in syrup. Taking it downstairs and rinsing it out feels like too hefty a burden, something you cannot handle when the best you can do to act okay is withdraw and wrap yourself in a fantasy where you can have both parents and they get along and everything in your life follows the same path it would have before that day ten months ago.

***

Kailyn Kausen

Kailyn Kausen is a writer from the California Central Valley with an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University. Previously, she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Spectrum literary journal and has been published in Disturbed Digest, The Writing Disorder, and The Bitter Oleander.