The Weekend Eudemon
It will be a light Weekend Eudemon today. Eric Scheske's wife and girls are abandoning him this morning, leaving for Detroit while he stays home with the four boys, including 22-month-old terror, Max. When we named the kid after Maximilian Kolbe, we hoped he would imitate the saint, not the Nazis. No such luck.
Eric is also a little groggy after spending a few hours at the Hillcrest Lounge with his father and a friend. Beer is currently proscribed to Eric, so he drank wine, a rather risky proposition at "The Hill," a bar with a redneck reputation that serves beer only in longneck bottles. Fortunately, Eric was able to drink his glasses of wine without any molestation, whether of the sexual, violent, or generally humiliating sort, like, "Hey boy, what you got there? A Shirley Temple? How 'bout if I just kick your girly behind right now?" His father and friend made a few jokes about Eric's sexual orientation and asked the waitress to bring him a straw for his pop, but other than that, Eric got away with it.
Scintillating conversation at The Hill, by the way. While we overheard patrons yelling "You owe the jukebox a dollar" and laughing uproariously over drunken feats, Eric and company talked about bankruptcy, criminal law, tax depreciation schedules, and other topics of interest only to nerds and masochists.
And we wonder why we can't get others to join us out there.
The Punchy Journal
The rambling narratives of Nate Brewer. For new readers: This is fiction, not an autobiographical account of Eric Scheske's daily life, though parallels exist.
. . . The next morning wasn't pretty. I'm simply incapable of sleeping much past 6:30–a biological condition I thought accosted only people who are at least fifty years old. Because I'm one of those unlucky carcasses that can't function with less than eight hours sleep, I'm in trouble. I got almost eight hours, but each beer seems to require another ten minutes of sleep from me, so I needed about nine-and-a-half hours.
Anyway, I dropped off the kids at school and made it to the office. I have a great $500 chair that I bought for $75 (the manufacturer placed the wrong-colored arms on the chair; I got it at a refuse warehouse). The hydraulics allow the chair to recline and adjust in four different ways. Closest thing to a Lazy-Boy in office furniture. I'll be using it later to sleep.
I'm an attorney in a small law office, the traditional sort that does a smattering of legal this and legal that: real estate, business, wills. I rarely go to court. I dislike all the procedural rules and the stress, preferring to reserve my emotional energy for more important things, like the NCAA Basketball Tournament
A little while ago, however, I handled a pre-nuptial and adoption for a long-time client. Pre-nups are considered by many to be part of estate planning, so I know a little about them.
But not enough to prepare myself for what happened today.
The client came in, fuming angry. He married a woman who had been married twice before. He had previously retained me to prepare a pre-nuptial agreement to protect his assets.
I drew up a standard pre-nuptial agreement, which he and his fiancé duly signed. They got married, and, about a year later, I organized a step-parent adoption for him so he could become the father of her six-year-old son. The adoption took about a year because the biological father dragged it out, finally insisting on $5,000 cash from my client in order to sign off on the paperwork.
About two weeks after the adoption went through, the wife served him with divorce papers. He came to me to discuss it. I pulled out the pre-nup agreement and assured him that it would hold up. She would only get one-half of their “marital assets,” defined in the agreement to mean assets acquired after the marriage, which, in this case, constituted a mutual fund with about $6,000 in it and one car. No alimony, which was expressly excluded by the agreement.
I then started explaining his child support obligations. Bill stopped me. “I'm only supposed to be obligated to pay her one-half of the marital assets. I don't have to pay anything else. Isn't that what you drew up?”
The question was loaded and I could see was getting combative.
“Yes,” I said, “but this isn't an issue between you two. Your son has a right to support from you, regardless of the pre-nup.”
“You mean I have to pay for a kid that's not even mine?” he said, jaws clenched.
“He is yours, Bill. That's what happened when you adopted him. He's not just a step-child; he's your child.”
“That's a bunch of bulls***,” he said, “Why didn't you tell me all this before?”
This is one of the worst times to be a lawyer. At one level, he's right: I didn't warn him that the adoption would present a major loophole to the pre-nuptial agreement. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'm obligated to think of it; the two issues are distinct: He adopted the son because he loves him (supposedly) and he is, at least in the law's eyes, as much the boy's father as if he were the biological father. It's not an issue for the pre-nup. The client came to my office, knowing that child support would be an issue (the Divorce Complaint included a plea for support) and that he had been duped. He came to me to fight.
“Why did you adopt the boy, if you didn't want to provide for him?” I asked.
“I adopted him because she wanted me to. He's not my kid and you know that,” he said.
“I don't know what to tell you. The law says he has a right to support from his father. By adopting him, you displaced his biological father and stepped into his shoes. There's nothing I could've placed in the pre-nup agreement that would've prevented this.”
“Then you should've told me this when I came back to you for the adoption,” he said.
“Again,” I replied, “I assumed you were adopting the boy for the sake of the boy. Not for her sake. I apologize if I should've asked about your emotional life, but I didn't think of it. If you want me to put a claim into my malpractice carrier, just say so, but I didn't create this mess.”
I was getting a little sarcastic with him, which isn't a good thing to do when you live in a small community because people talk when they're mad, but I wasn't going to take the fall for this guy's lifetime blunder.
He was just sitting there, staring off into the corner over my right shoulder, with a mean look on his face. I continued, more softly this time:
“Look. Get a second opinion. I don't think you're going to find any lawyers who will say I botched this up. You just need to deal with it the best you can.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said, glaring at me and getting up, “I'll go someplace else and see what they say.”
All that with a nagging hangover. . .
