The Day I Came Home to a Party That Broke My Daughter

Chapter 10 – The Puzzle of the Family in the House
The final order came three weeks later.

Ms. Alvarez called me at lunch and read it to me over the phone while I stood in the parking lot of the tire shop and held my breath.

Renee’s visitation was terminated.

Not suspended.

Terminated.

She could apply again after she completed a year of anger counseling and a parenting course, and even then the visits would be supervised and the supervisor would not be her.

There would be a review every six months.

Renee did not come to the follow-up hearing.

Her lawyer came and entered a statement, and the statement said she was cooperating with the court’s recommendations, and that was the last thing I heard from her directly for a long time.

I drove to Carol’s house and picked up Lily from school and did not tell her anything that night.

I wanted a night where she was just an eight-year-old eating macaroni at the kitchen table with her aunt, and that was what we had.

Brianna moved in with her aunt Denise in September for her senior year.

She came by every couple of weeks at first, then once a month, then on holidays.

She graduates this spring and she wants to study nursing, and she still texts me things like happy birthday to Lily with a dinosaur emoji, because Lily had a dinosaur phase last year and Brianna never forgot it.

Marcus calls me.

Not often.

Once a month or so, usually on Sundays.

He says he is working on himself.

I don’t ask what that means because it’s not my business.

But he showed up at Lily’s school play in the fall and sat in the back and clapped, and Lily waved at him from the stage, and that was that.

Renee’s cousin Adrian went back home after the hearing and we haven’t spoken since.

He did the one thing a person with a camera should do, and then he went home, and I will always owe him for that.

Lily went back to school in the middle of September, about two weeks after everything.

The principal met me at the office, and the school counselor did four sessions with Lily, and by October she was complaining about a boy in her class named Evan who kept eating glue, and I took that as a good sign.

Here is the part I have been trying to get to.

The gift bag sat on the shelf in my closet for two months.

I walked past it every morning putting on a tie.

I had opened it once, at the storage unit, when Marcus and I were pulling folders, and I had seen the card, and I had put the card back in the bag and not touched it since.

I knew what it was.

I did not want to know what was under it.

On a Sunday morning in November, Lily was sitting on the living room floor in a hoodie and shorts she was not going to change out of for any reason, and I went to the closet and got the bag and brought it out and set it on the kitchen table.

She said, “What’s that?”

I said, “It’s your birthday present.

From the party.”

She looked at me for a second and then she got up off the floor and came over and sat down at the table and looked at the bag without touching it.

I said, “You can open it.”

She opened it slowly, one handle at a time, the way she does everything, and she pulled out the card first.

She looked at the front.

It was a picture of a house with a family in the window and the words Home Is Where We Are.

She opened it and read it and put it down without saying anything, and then she reached back into the bag and pulled out the box.

It was a puzzle.

Three hundred pieces.

A little family of four standing in front of a house with a dog and a tree and a car in the driveway.

Real simple.

The kind of thing you buy at the checkout line.

I had bought that box on a Tuesday afternoon on my way home from work because I had remembered Lily asking for one four months before at a birthday party we went to, and I had remembered wrong, because she wanted a puzzle of a horse.

She looked at the box and turned it over in her hands and looked at me and said, “I don’t like this kind.”

I said, “I know.

I got it before I knew what you wanted.”

She said, “Can I still do it?”

I said, “Yeah.

I’ll do it with you.”

So we sat on the living room floor and opened the box and dumped the pieces out between us and turned on the lamp and started with the frame, the way you’re supposed to.

She did the sky and I did the grass and the dog, and it took us two hours and part of the afternoon, and when it was done there was a family in front of a house looking out at us, four of them, a boy and a girl and a mom and a dad, and none of them looked like us, and Lily said, “There’s no girl that looks like me.”

I said, “No.”

She was quiet for a while, fitting the last corner piece in.

Then she said, “Is Renee coming back?”

I had been waiting for that question for two months.

I put the last piece in and sat back on the floor and said, “She might.

Not for a while.

Not until everybody can be sure she’s safe to be around.

That’s the rule, and it’s a good rule, and I’m going to be watching every single day either way.”