My Cowboy Husband Neglected Me Ignored Our Baby for Another Woman's novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: The Courthouse Steps

On Friday the whole county came to the courthouse steps.

Trucks lined the square as far as I could see.

The diner owner had closed the diner and brought a coffee urn.

The retired judge stood by the door in his good hat.

The foreman, the dispatcher and the church ladies stood in a row on the grass, and the widow held Daisy on her hip.

Somebody in the crowd was filming, because somebody always was.

Dean wore a pressed shirt, and it was too big on him.

Birdie held his left hand, with her cast in a sling and the horse tucked under her good arm.

"Are we going to see a judge?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Is she mean?"

"She's a lady with silver hair," Dean said. "You'll like her. She reads everything."

Jesse's mother came up the walk at ten to nine.

She was small and straight and sixty-two, and she wore her church coat, and she carried a manila envelope in both hands.

She had sat across from me at five years of Sunday dinners.

She had never once looked at me the way she did now.

"Hattie," she said.

"Mrs. Tillman."

"You'll call me Ma, or you'll call me nothing." She took my hand in her dry one. "I should have asked my son a question five years ago. I raised him not to lie, and I never raised him to lie to you."

"He's trying."

"I've noticed."

The deputy's car pulled up to the curb at nine.

Lottie got out of the back seat in the clothes she had been arrested in.

Her hands were cuffed in front.

A man in a gray suit came down the steps to meet her, with a briefcase and a Billings haircut.

He took her elbow.

"Don't say anything," he told her, loud enough for the first row to hear. "I've seen the filings. I'll handle the rest."

She saw the crowd.

She saw the phones.

For the length of a breath, I watched her reach for her smile, and not find it.

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