Chapter 4: The Apartment With Two Toothbrushes
I wasn't there when she walked through his apartment. That was the point.
The interim order had me with my mom for two weeks while the home study was scheduled, and I was at her kitchen table after school trying to finish a math worksheet when Mrs. Delgado knocked on his door. I didn't learn what happened until later, when my mom read me the parts of the report she was allowed to read, in that careful voice she used when she didn't want to make it bigger than it was.
Mrs. Delgado told me later she arrived at 4:15 on a Tuesday. My father answered on the second knock. He was polite, she wrote. He offered her water and smiled and said he'd been cleaning all morning getting ready.
The first thing she noticed was the shirt. My father's light blue button-down was hanging on the back of the dining chair, freshly ironed, the collar still stiff. He'd worn it to court that first day when he leaned forward and raised his voice, and now it hung there like proof he was a man who took things seriously. He'd even left the hanger balanced perfectly straight.
"Come on in," he said. "I've got her room all set up."
She followed him down the short hallway of the second-floor apartment over the hardware store on Main. The carpet was new, vacuum lines still fresh. He opened the door to what he called my room and stepped aside with his hand on the frame, waiting for her to be impressed.
There was a twin bed with a pink comforter still folded with its creases from the package. A small white dresser with nothing on top except a single framed school picture of me from the fall — the one where my hair was pulled back and I wasn't smiling. One plastic bin of toys, unopened. The closet had two tiny hangers.
"She loves it here," he said. "She's got her own space. Stability, routine, you know."
Mrs. Delgado nodded and didn't answer right away. She wrote in her notebook. She opened the closet and saw it was empty except for those hangers. She touched the comforter and felt how it hadn't been slept in. She asked if she could see where I kept my clothes, and he hesitated for half a second before saying of course, they were in the wash.
That was when she saw the sweater.
My dusty pink ribbed sweater — the one I'd worn to court when I couldn't stop crying — was folded on top of his dresser in the main bedroom, not in the child's room at all. I'd left it there on the last overnight before the hearing because I'd gotten hot and he'd told me to leave it. He hadn't moved it. He'd staged everything else, but that sweater sat there like something he forgot to put back into the story. Mrs. Delgado asked whose it was and he said, "Oh, she just left that, I was going to bring it," and she wrote that down exactly.
She didn't argue with him. She kept walking. In the kitchen, the fridge had a half-gallon of milk, a takeout container, and a lot of empty shelf. No kid's yogurt, no juice boxes, none of the things he'd listed on his form where he checked the boxes for balanced meals. The trash under the sink was the part I remember my mom pausing on when she read it.
There was a school paper crumpled on top. A math worksheet with my name in my own handwriting, the one with the little stars at the top, dated three weeks earlier. The date was stamped by my teacher. He'd told the judge I was with him four nights a week that month, that he helped with homework every evening, but that worksheet had been in my backpack at my mom's the whole time. And the trash bag itself had the receipt taped to the pickup schedule on the fridge — pickup was Mondays, but the bag was already full of fast-food wrappers dated Sunday and Monday, meaning it hadn't been taken out when he said he'd deep-cleaned Monday morning.
Mrs. Delgado didn't point any of it out. She just took a photo of the paper where it lay and noted the milk expiration and the empty cabinets. She thanked him, said she'd be in touch, and left while he was still standing in that clean, quiet living room that didn't look like any kid lived there at all.
I asked my mom what the report said at the end, and she smoothed the paper with her hand.
"It says the home appears orderly but shows few signs of regular occupancy by a six-year-old," she read. "And that inconsistencies were noted between reported routine and observed evidence."
She folded it back up. She didn't say what that meant.
Two days later Mrs. Delgado filed it from her office in the county building. I picture her typing it plain, no adjectives, just what she saw: the ironed shirt, the empty closet, the pink sweater in the wrong room, the worksheet with a date that didn't match. She checked the box that said additional assessment recommended and left it for the judge.
My father called my mom that night and asked how it went, like he thought it had gone well. He said Mrs. Delgado seemed nice. He asked when I was coming back for the weekend.
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My mom said mediation was set for next week and that we'd have to wait for the court to decide. She didn't tell him what was in the report.
I stayed in my room that night and wore that pink sweater again because it smelled like my mom's laundry detergent now, not his apartment at all.
