I nodded, because I wanted to believe him, and in that moment I did believe him. He was steady in a way I needed someone to be steady. He told me what would happen next. He would file a response with the court challenging the guardianship. He would ask for a hearing. He would gather the evidence, and he would prepare me to tell the court, in my own words, what had happened in that hospital room. He said it would not be quick, and it would not be easy, but it would be done properly.
Chapter 21
— A De Facto Mother
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon, while Poppy was at the kitchen table with Dolores doing her schoolwork and I was in the workshop trying to finish a chair that had been waiting for me for days. I saw the number on my phone and my stomach tightened before my mind had even caught up, because I knew that number. I knew it the way you know a sound you never want to hear again. It was Veronica.
I let it ring. I stood there with sawdust on my sleeves and the phone buzzing in my hand, and I let it ring until it stopped. Then it rang again. And then, a minute later, a message arrived. I read it standing in the doorway of the workshop, and I read it twice, because the first time I thought I must have misunderstood it. She wanted to see Poppy. She said she had a right to see Poppy. She said she was Poppy's de facto mother.
De facto mother. Veronica was not Poppy's mother. Meredith was Poppy's mother, and Meredith had been gone for two years. Veronica had been my fiancée for a time, and she had lived in my house for a time, and she had helped Poppy with her homework and sat beside her at dinner, but none of that made her a mother. None of that gave her a right to my daughter. And yet there it was on my phone screen, written in her neat, careful language, as if it were a fact she could simply declare into being.
I called Oliver before I answered her. That was the first thing I did right that day, and I was proud of myself for it later, because my first instinct had been to call her back and tell her exactly what I thought of her in words I would have regretted. Oliver told me not to reply at all. He told me not to call her, not to write to her, not to argue with her by text. He said anything I said could be used, and anything she said should come through the proper channels now, through lawyers and through the court, where there was a record of it. He said I should save the message and send him a copy, and then I should go back inside and be with my daughter and let him handle the rest.
I did what he said. I sent him a copy of the message, and then I went inside and sat with Poppy while she finished her schoolwork. She was copying letters in her careful, uneven hand, and she looked up at me and asked if I was all right, because children notice more than we think they do. I told her I was fine, and that I loved her, and that nothing was going to change the way our house worked. She nodded and went back to her letters, and I sat there and thought about the words de facto mother until they stopped sounding like words at all and started sounding like what they were, which was a claim. A claim on my child.
That evening, after Poppy was asleep, Oliver called me back. He had read the message, and he had already started looking into what Veronica meant by it. He explained it to me in the plain way he always did. A de facto mother, he said, was a term some people used for a person who had acted like a parent, who had lived with a child and cared for a child day after day, and who then argued that the bond they had built should count for something in law. It was not a title you could simply give yourself. A judge would look at the whole picture, at how long the person had been in the child's life, at what the relationship had really been like, and at what was best for the child. And in our case, he said, the picture was very clear.
Veronica had been in Poppy's life for less than a year. She had not raised Poppy from a baby. Dolores had been there. I had been there. Meredith had been there before she died. Veronica had arrived later, and what she had done in that later time was not the work of a mother. A mother did not tell a six-year-old girl that her curls were ugly and that no one would love her with messy hair. A mother did not cut a child's hair while her father was downstairs, and then stand there as if she had done something kind. A mother did not trick a father into signing a legal form in a hospital bed. Those were not the acts of a mother. They were the acts of a person who wanted control.