Chapter 20: The Hearing

The courtroom was the same one, with the same long oak benches and the same flag in the corner.

This time I came in a wheelchair, with a hospital blanket on my knees and a nurse walking beside me with a bag of fluids on a pole.

The judge had agreed to thirty minutes.

Mom pushed me down the aisle herself, past rows of people I knew.

There was the principal, and the school nurse, and half a dozen mothers from the pickup line.

Somebody had told the town.

Alana sat in the front row on our side, with a manila envelope in her lap and Eli's hand in her sister's.

Across the aisle, Grandma Maureen sat in a navy dress with her pearls on and a lawyer on each side.

Dad sat at the end of her bench, alone, with his hands folded between his knees.

He had not slept since Thursday.

"Be seated," the bailiff said.

The judge came in and took her chair, and she looked at me over her glasses for a long moment.

"Miss Eichelberger. I'm glad to see you."

"Thank you, Your Honor."

"Let's begin. Counselor."

Grandma Maureen's lawyer stood and buttoned his jacket.

He said that Signe Eichelberger had taken employment at the child's school against the father's wishes.

He said she had been seen at a pickup line shouting.

He said that a nine-year-old girl had collapsed in a public gym after months of exposure to her mother's emotional pressure.

"The grandmother only wants a safe home," he finished.

The judge wrote something down.

"Mrs. Eichelberger, will you take the stand?"

Grandma Maureen walked up to the box slowly, with one hand on the rail.

She was good at it.

She said that she had raised Craig alone, that she loved Maddy more than her own life, and that every decision she made had been for the child.

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