“If anything,” Ryan later said, “I learned, right then and there, that my family needed me to be less compassionate in this world.” His wide-eyed quest for social justice finally looked naive. He’d trusted the broker, in spite of his quirks and idiosyncrasies, just as he’d trusted violent offenders, addicts, and other scofflaws. He’d helped hundreds of indigent people, admirably, but in the process, at least in his mind, he’d nearly failed us. His hourly need to micromanage our finances just to keep us solvent, combined with the broker’s fraud and Reginald Price’s deadbeat shortcomings, was the wake-up call he needed. The money could be dirty, sullied, laced with the sad and sordid details of his clients’ lives, but, so long as he collected more of it, retainers or advances, we could selfishly make our lives better.
Ryan settled a small personal injury case, long in the making, and invested the earnings into completely revamping his criminal law practice, vowing never, ever, to repeat the first seven years of Ulrich Law Office. He called the public defender’s office. “Load me up on cases,” he said. And from that moment on, he refused to accept any private clients without the money up front.
One day, a referral showed up at his office, unannounced. “I heard you take merch,” he said when Ryan asked for $3,000 up front.
“You heard I take what?” Ryan asked, not at first understanding his slang.
“The guy who referred me said sometimes you’ll take merchandise for your fee.”
“He did, huh?” Ryan said, chuckling. “Well, once upon a time, maybe, but not anymore. It’s all up front or nothing.” This was the end of an era. No more donuts or keychains or Green Bay Packers memorabilia. It was money or nothing.
When Ryan told me about the guy hoping to use merchandise as a retainer, I asked, “What do you suppose he did when you didn’t agree?”
“Hell if I know,” Ryan said. “Got a public defender, maybe. All I know is it ain’t my problem.”
Reginald Price ended up sentenced to four years in prison, followed by seven years parole, after Ryan spent nine long, fruitless months defending the guy. Even though Price was a “huge pain in the ass,” he was essential to Ryan’s rehabilitation. Before Reginald Price, Ryan was a pushover, a guy running an outreach program, legal aid nearly free of charge, a philosophy of the heart. But after Reginald Price, Ryan was more hard-hearted than ever before, which is exactly what we needed him to be.
CHAPTER 11:
Criminal Procedure
Unlike his, my heart remained soft as wet chalk, even if, in our story, I was the bad guy. When the crime is sex, only women are caught red-handed. The body is evidence. Exhibit A: our bellies inflating like Chinese lanterns, small fires suspended, flickering DNA, waist-high above the dirt. Although teased to some extent for the proliferation of our kids (and their carbon footprints), Ryan, my partner in crime, had been fingered by eyewitnesses and investigators as mere accomplice, subjected to lesser guilt for the same crimes, as if he were just the lookout assigned a post in the alley behind a bank I robbed at gunpoint.
I was the one to blame. Half a year into our new lives, Ryan still hadn’t scheduled a vasectomy—awaiting my blessing, he said—so I was responsible for carefully charting my cycles, the rhythm method of family planning our fail-safe since Gustav, now a mischievous and wicked three-year-old, was born. Even at thirty-eight, advanced maternal age by three years, my cycles were as predictable as the Advent calendar; we anticipated those smiling eggs from behind their perforated paper windows. I’d mark menstruation monthly, a delicate red X. Every four weeks, bleeding confirmed my textbook body. How else would we have made five spring babies (timed to match semester’s end) so decisively?
Ryan was working a lot—a lot—of hours in the summer of 2016, but still, to continue affording our new home, we sought creative money-earning opportunities such as renting our house during the Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In, the largest of its kind in the world. Oshkosh hotels could not accommodate a half million tourists, so Oshkosh residents rented their properties. We’d be renting ours to an aerospace engineering company for ten days, and in exchange, we’d rent a cottage in Waupaca for a small portion of the cost. I vacuumed, mopped, scoured, and laundered bedding in preparation, a lot like nesting before the birth of a child, only I didn’t get to stay. I jam-packed bags, laundry baskets, and suitcases with clothes, swimming gear, books, games, and food. I did not pack the calendar, though. Did I really need it?
At the cottage, we would relax, or so we thought. Gustav refused to wear a life jacket on the boat or in the water. When we insisted, he’d kick, bite, and scream with Herculean might at whomever tried to teach him about water safety. In response, Irie suffered panic attacks about his safety. His favorite game was hiding in stores, neighbors’ yards, and restaurants—even in Waupaca, which was foreign territory to our kids. Convinced he’d be cached, forevermore, in the weedy bottom of Long Lake, Irie would hide away in her room, headphones clamped to her ears, reassuring herself with music that Ryan and I were attentively supervising the younger children. Thanks to Gustav’s rowdy disposition, she’d developed phobias of kitchen knives and forks, knitting needles, paintbrushes, hockey sticks and baseball bats, any common household or recreational implement that might lead to his death. Danger hankered to devour her youngest brother.
Even at home in Oshkosh, Irie spent most of that summer in the basement, drowning out the sounds of our family with white noise and Broadway tunes. I’d been worried about passing depression on to our children, but in the psyche of our firstborn,
