By the Fourth of July, a month after the flood, gasoline prices had vaulted to $4.18 per gallon. Between the car payment and the price of fuel, we were spending more than $1,000 per month on Ryan’s transportation. A truck driver once chased him down Highway 41 in a fit of road rage. What if he’d been murdered? Would he have minded? “I’ll make sure to set you up with a nice life insurance policy,” he always joked. But mileage became his stock answer as to why he was quitting his job, and the June flood was another good justification for leaving Milwaukee. Fathers should be near at hand, in case of emergencies. Ryan resigned from his first law job in July and left officially in September.
The day after the flood, the Oshkosh Northwestern headline read WASHED OUT. Better that than washed up. I wonder now, on those arduous drives, how many times Ryan conjured up the worst solutions—burning our house down, running away and changing his identity, if not simply jumping from his office window—to our already looming money problems. “Poor at the bank; rich in love” remained my naive philosophy. Ryan and I seemed to have boarded little rescue boats coasting in opposite directions. I cast my anchor toward Ryan’s unrelenting hopelessness, and he cast his toward me, as we worked hard to remain compatible. At the end of each day, though, the burden of family morale fell heavily upon me, the idealist and dreamer.
So much damage was yet to be uncovered after the flood—warped infrastructures, rust, mold, mildew, and all the chemical breakdowns inside our houses and schools. The Northwestern reporters tried to keep up: WINNEBAGO COUNTY’S CLEANING TAB AT $13M AND CLIMBING. In that same issue, editors printed a cartoon of a man and woman in a raft labeled OSHKOSH FLOODING. She is smiling, and her thought bubble reads, “All through bailing. Looks like we’ll stay afloat after all.” The man, however, is looking up at a tsunami labeled CONTINUED STORMS, eyes bulging, mouth agape. I might have taken this for a sign, but I could not have dreamed how Ryan’s impending career in criminal defense would alter the trajectory of our lives.
Casework in criminal law was readily available in 2008—the least lucrative but most efficient way to start a legal practice, especially for a family man with a mortgage. On September 17 of that year, Ulrich Law Office would be inaugurated in suite 812 of the First National Bank Building on Main Street in Oshkosh. Ryan accepted work like a beggar, taking up alms, welcoming into our lives not just town drunks but drug dealers, heroin and meth addicts, thieves, violent men on the brink of homicide, and mothers who birthed their babies but failed their real-world maternity tests.
As the onslaught of rain turned to drizzle, I opened the sliding doors of our van. Ryan had enlisted his parents to retrieve us in their all-terrain truck. We were waiting.
Fern, though no feline, mewed for milk. Hunkered on the rear bumper, I cradled and breastfed my baby girl again, as Irie and Leo saluted strangers in kayaks and canoes paddling up Michigan Street. As a child, I’d visited Wetlands and Waterways, a permanent exhibit at the Oshkosh Public Museum, dozens of times and often wished I could see Oshkosh at the end of its Ice Age, a wish that seemed to have come true. We applauded passersby in their makeshift dinghies. In the summer of 2008 and forever after, floods were earmarked as our meteorological frames of reference.
“Can we swim?” Irie asked in that moment, perched above the first flood of her short lifetime, and I almost said yes. Fern at my breast, I was buzzing with the thrill of motherhood, recklessly invincible and wide-eyed. Later that night, I’d breastfeed Leo and Fern together, one “baby” per breast, worth the double shot of oxytocin. If I had traversed this historic flood, I could do anything. Jacked up on survival, I felt ready to baptize all of us by plunging headfirst into the floodwaters of euphoria or oblivion—whichever came first.
CHAPTER 1:
The Walmart Heist
Derek Green and Allison Shaffer engineered their first Walmart shopping heist by hiring a babysitter for their newborn daughter, Destiny; borrowing the babysitter’s Chevy Astro minivan as their getaway vehicle; and looting, along with the rest of their spoils, a case of Milwaukee’s Best Ice—the Cadillac of Wisconsin beers—to pay the babysitter, fair and generous compensation, depending, arguably, on how many beers she would drink per hour.
Unfortunately, their babysitter must have been on duty elsewhere the night Green and Shaffer planned their encore caper. Destiny, fledgling conspirator, accompanied her parents, Daddy at the helm of her hand-me-down Cosco stroller. Along the dark frontage road, cars seethed and snow flurries churned a full mile until the family arrived at their destination. Inside the whirlwind beyond the sliding doors, where hot met cold, Shaffer selected a cart, gripped the handles, and ambled into the superstore, followed by Green, the baby, and the baby carriage.
Did they wave to Walmart greeters or clerks as they maneuvered toward Baby & Toddler, a slow-motion shopping spree, which Shaffer had expertly rehearsed, hands like soft paddle wheels? She propelled the cart forward, pulling baby clothes—Gerber Onesies, fleece leggings, and Garanimals hoodies—into the belly of the shopping trolley. This cart could hold eighteen thousand cubic inches of merchandise. Maximizing the space, not minimizing the cost, was the object of Mama’s concern. With each little stocking cap, Shaffer’s heart pumped frantic hyper-oxidized blood to her brain. She felt awakened, even as baby Destiny snored beneath her frayed canopy.
Green then suggested a tour of Electronics, where he laid eyes immediately upon a Sony Home Theater. He realized they might have a problem. If Shaffer was pushing the cart, and Green was pushing Destiny, who would carry the fifteen-pound box? He knew from experience,
