The Only Way I Could Get Justice

As always, I use real places for local color when I can: Central Baptist Hospital, PNC Bank, the Meadowthorpe area, street names and Kroger are all real places. Maybe it'll amuse some of the readers who actually live or work at those places. The persons depicted are all fictional, and any resemblance to any person, living, dead or undead, is entirely coincidental.

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"But I'm not the father! How can you order me to pay child support?"

Maybe screaming at the judge wasn't the right thing to do. Her fucking honor was a bitch, and the bitches always side with the bitches. And after my (not very good) attorney managed to get me calmed down, by noting that the inside of the Lexington-Fayette County jail wasn't a particularly nice place to go, and that her fucking honor could summarily send me to the clink for contempt of court, I just stood there, fists clenched in anger, but still silent, trying to keep my temper in check. I had to look straight ahead, because I knew that if I looked over toward the petitioner's table, I'd see my fucking wife, in just minutes to be my fucking ex-wife, just smirking at me.

After eleven years of marriage, we had three kids. Or rather, she had three kids; I had only two, and given what happened with the third, maybe I shouldn't be too sure about the first two. At least the DNA tests in the end proved that the first two were mine.

The bitch had screwed around on me. When Justin, her third, was born, I had just assumed, like I had with Savannah and Michael Jr, that he was mine. Of course, us being married, my name automatically went on the birth certificate, making me the legal father. And now that I was divorcing the bitch, this fucking bitch judge was ordering me to pay child support on a son who wasn't actually my son.

We weren't wealthy, not by any means, but if we were working class, we were at least well-to-do working class. Karen, my wife, my fucking around wife, was a registered nurse, making good money, almost $80 grand a year at Central Baptist Hospital as an Emergency Room nurse, and if I didn't make quite that much, as an electrician for Harrod Concrete I was well paid, having to work on everything from 440-three phase to lights to standard receptacles. Three ready-mix plants plus the quarry kept me damned busy, and believe me, it wasn't an eight-to-five job. Breakdowns are often patched together to make it through the day, and then we have to do the real repair work after the last load has left the plant, to be ready to roll again at six the next morning.

Many was the day that I didn't get home until after eight, covered with grease and grime and sweat from having to change out a big electric motor or chase down some wiring problem, though at least the wiring problems weren't (usually) heavy, dirty labor issues.

I suppose those late evenings led to some of my problems, but Hell, Karen's ER shifts ran from seven in the morning until seven-thirty at night, though she only did three shifts a week, not the five, and sometimes six, days I had to work.

Me? Like any concrete company, the workforce was almost all male. The few women who worked there were office critters, some cute and some not, but I didn't have much contact with them. There were a couple of female mixer and dump truck drivers, and they were like Polk Salad Annie's momma: wretched, spiteful, straight-razor totin' women! They had to be, going out by themselves onto jobsites with a bunch of male concrete finishers.

Nope, I wasn't the least bit interested in messin' with any of them on the side. I had too nice a wife at home, and not only was she pretty, she brought home good money.

Thing is, if there was certainly nobody where I worked that I'd be interested in having some fun on the side with, the same wasn't true of Karen's workplace. You know how hospitals are: just crawling with doctors and techs and EMTs and everything else, guys who wore scrubs but were (mostly) clean every day, working in heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, guys who were "better" catches than an industrial electrician, a lot of whom were better looking and younger than me.

And if Karen wasn't college girl skinny anymore, she sure wasn't fat. Pushing and pulling on 240 lb guys in the ER all day was as good as any gym workout, and she was sturdy and strong, the kind of woman who drew respect from everyone. She had a real talent for getting IVs started in patients with the worst veins, getting called over whenever a more difficult case came in. She could get an NG tube inserted in like twenty seconds, and if she wasn't the boss in the ER, she was The Boss, and everybody knew it. Her brunette hair had just a touch or premature grey in it, which had the practical effect of silver highlights, and her blue eyes commanded attention.

Lookswise, she wasn't out of my league when we met, dated and got married. Twelve years later, twelve years of me working outside in every kind of weather, and yeah, maybe she was out of my league now. Sure, I was thick with muscle: climbing eighty feet into the air on top of silos, pulling wire, wrestling with heavy motors made sure of that. Then again, eating the kind of diner and fast food lunches, and sometimes dinners, that plant workers scarf down had added some thickness that wasn't muscle to my waistline, but I was hardly obese. My hair hadn't started going grey yet, but a weather-beaten face and rough calloused hands marked me for what I was: a solidly blue-collar worker. I might attract some appreciative looks from women in my "class," but I sure wasn't going to get them from Karen's hospital friends.

At five-foot-eleven I was a touch taller than average, but it still annoyed me at times that it wasn't six-foot. Karen was five-seven, so I wasn't that much taller than her.

You know how it is: you can go into your wife's workplace, to bring her something to eat on days when you're off and she's still working, and the other nurses might appreciate me for being nice to my wife, but you can tell: there aren't going to be any comments to her afterward, "How did you land him?"

I had just started with Harrod when we met, making decent money, but before all of the years that gave me the weatherbeaten look. Karen was finishing her last semester at UK, getting her Bachelor of Science in Nursing, and looking mighty fine to me. With my hours, she appreciated that I'd be fine with what she anticipated working, and the money I was making was close to what she expected to earn. We didn't fall into bed on our first date, but I could see it: it wouldn't be too much longer before we did.

I didn't expect Karen to be a virgin. Hell, she was a college student, a really cute coed type, on a campus full of other girls and guys all down to fuck, and the culture was hooking up; how many virgins are you going to find at UK?

Remember, Kentucky is the land of beautiful horses and fast women!

But, whatever her past, and Karen didn't volunteer much about it, she wasn't with her last boyfriend, and that did please me. I wasn't a virgin either, though I figured I might have gotten lucky with fewer women than she had with guys.

We got married a bit sooner than I had expected, as it seemed that Savannah wasn't waiting around for us to get married to be conceived. It wasn't a big wedding at all, just us getting married by a judge, with my mom and her parents in attendance. Still, that made us just as married as some of these high-maintenance bitches who get their daddies to drop $40 grand on a big to-do.

Karen had graduated, she was pregnant, and was worried to death about passing her boards. She came back to our apartment crying that she'd just ruined everything and failed her boards, but I told her not to worry because the testing computer had shut down early; that almost surely meant she'd passed easily, not that she'd failed. It was later that week when she received the notification: she'd passed, and was now a real registered nurse.

We wanted to celebrate, but she wasn't going to drink anything alcoholic, not six months pregnant. She was already working at Central Baptist, as an RNA -- registered nurse applicant -- while waiting on her boards, and now everything was a relief. I suggested the absolute best celebratory present: let's go house hunting.

Everything was great! It was 2008, and the economy had gone to shit. With the economy, the housing market had collapsed, and that meant a lot of people selling, with damned few buyers. With us, an electrician with a long, solidly established company, and Karen, an RN in a recession-proof job, we were ideal buyers. We were earning about $120 grand together at the time, home prices in Kentucky were already lower than the national average, and if Lexington was the most expensive market in the state, prices still weren't what they were in other states. Add to that the Fed dropping interest rates like a rock, to fight the recession, and mortgage interest rates were falling with them. We picked up a four bedroom brick rancher in the Meadowthorpe area off of Leestown Road for a song. The house was in good shape, and the only work that needed to be done on it was rewiring, because it was built in 1955, and simply needed to be upgraded.

Well, we now had a four-bedroom house, and it looked like Karen wanted to fill it up! Savannah was born, and it was barely a year later that my namesake, Michael Ryan Reynolds, Jr, was implanted in her womb. Savannah was a great baby, and looked like she'd be the spitting image of Karen. That was a good thing, 'cause if she had looked like me, well, I was OK looking for a man, but I'd be an ugly girl.

Like Savannah, Mike Jr wound up looking like his mom, same brown hair, same blue eyes, and on the thin side.

It was four years later when Justin made his appearance. He didn't look as much like Karen as Savannah and Junior did, but was hardly the spitting image of me. I just assumed that that was how more of a mix between us turned out.

It wasn't until Justin was three that I started to wonder. Justin was growing up, but I wasn't seeing much of Karen in him, and I wasn't seeing much of me in there, either.

And where did the name Justin come from? Savannah? Well, that was a pretty popular name for girls in 2008 -- and we'd gone back and forth between Savannah and Cheyenne for her -- while Michael was naturally named after me.

But Justin? No one in the family named that, we didn't know anyone with that name, but that was what Karen picked, and I didn't have a problem with it.

I guess maybe I should have been suspicious from the start. Still, I didn't know that she knew any guys named Justin, though in a hospital the size of Central Baptist, she must've known hundreds of guys I hadn't heard about.

It was 2018, when I saw the story on WLEX-TV. A young surgeon from Central Baptist, a Justin Marsh, a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, had been killed in Nigeria in an Islamist attack by the rebel group Boko Haram. Channel 18 had a picture of Dr Marsh on television, and it was like looking at my son Justin, aged up twenty-five years.

The story was on at 6:14, just before the local weather report; Karen was still at work. She wasn't home to ask, but I knew, I just fucking knew. I reversed the TV feed, and watched the report again, and there was little doubt in my mind.

My rage boiled up in me, but I still had three children in the house, 10, 8 and 4, so I couldn't just fly into a rage. I was seething, but what could I do at that point. I sat in my easy chair, just staring at the television, but I still had more than an hour before Karen would get home, and I had three kids to feed. I hardly ever drink during the week, but I needed a beer right then.

At least I had something to do: I had to fix dinner for Karen and the kids. Karen had picked up some Atlantic salmon steaks from the Kroger on Leestown Road yesterday, and those were something I knew how to cook. Parchment paper over the metal baking pan, some olive oil, salt and pepper on the bottom, then the same on the top, bake 25 minutes at 375º, and they'd be done. Some white rice, that simmers for 15 minutes after you bring it to a full boil, and some broccoli in a steamer bag, and supper was simple. It gave me something to do with my hands other than punch a hole in the drywall.

It also gave me some time to think. I realized that yeah, my Justin looked like that asshole doctor, now that dead asshole doctor, but that wasn't proof, was it? DNA, that would be the proof.

Did Karen notice that I was tense and tight-lipped when she got home? Any normal day, she would have, and chalked it up to a rough day at work. Did she notice that I had slammed down two Coronas, something I almost never did on a weeknight? Maybe she would have, but she was red-eyed and wound up herself when she got home. Yeah, that was all the proof I needed: she'd heard the story at work and had been crying.

I thought about saying something then, but I knew that I needed to get my ducks in a row first, or I'd say the wrong thing and maybe fuck myself over. Karen was off tomorrow, while I had to work, and that meant that if she was alerted, she could get to a lawyer first, and that might screw me over.

At least work wasn't bad the next day; there were no electrical crises to deal with, and I asked the maintenance director if I could take the afternoon off. There was a computer in the maintenance shed, and I checked on divorce attorneys during the morning; there was one not too far away on Versailles Road, and I called and set up an appointment for 2:30.

Well, most of the appointment was with his fucking paralegal, but she gave me the straight skinny: Kentucky was a no-fault divorce state, and the most that proven adultery did was to have some influence on support orders. Still, that meant primarily alimony, not child support -- after all, the kids did nothing wrong -- and with Karen making a bit more money than I did, alimony wasn't going to be in the cards anyway.

Oh, she could ask for it, but it would be hard for her to get that granted if I fought it.

Near the end of my appointment, the shyster himself came into the room, and went over things briefly. He told me that I'd be better off if I had DNA proof that Justin wasn't my son, but, that with the probable father dead, there was no chance of getting child support for Justin from him. If he had a decent sized estate, perhaps I could sue that estate, but, and he was blunt about it, this Dr Marsh was now a kind of selfless local hero, and besmirching his name wasn't a winning tactic in family court.

Getting the DNA samples was easy-peasy. While cheek swabs were easiest, taking those would alert Karen as to what was going on. Much simpler was getting hair samples, though you have to be certain to get the root as well as the shaft. All that I had to do was get samples from their pillows. That was easy for Savannah and Karen; you could always get one from a hairbrush. For the boys, with their short hair, it took a few days, but I got and carefully bagged the samples.

Still, it wasn't cheap, and the lawyer had warned me about that. And yup, I got back the answer I had expected: I wasn't Justin's father. I hadn't been sure about Savannah and Junior, but it turned out that yeah, half of their DNA came from me.

It was a good thing that Karen wasn't in any mood to fuck for a few days; still broken up over the death of her lover, I guess. I knew that I'd have to do my husbandly duties in bed, or eventually she'd get suspicious, and I wanted to completely blindside her with the divorce. Besides, if she'd caught the clap or something from her fucking boyfriend, she'd have long since given it to me, so it wasn't like I needed to protect myself in that.

So, yeah, I fucked Karen, but it was Nicole Kidman in my imagination, it was the blonde waitress from the diner, the one with the lisp, I fantasized about, along with this really cute coed I'd seen in Kroger, the one with the Daisy Dukes, long, long tanned legs, the t-shirt tied up to show just a touch of bare midriff, and the highlighted light brunette hair that came down to her waist. My real cock might have been pounding Karen -- a bit more aggressively than usual, I might add -- but in my mind, it was that coed, her glorious hair spread out like a fan on the pillow as I spent my load inside of Karen's pussy.

That time let me plan what I was going to do. Yeah, half of our money was mine, and that's what the courts would award her, but fuck it, there was also what I was owed for supporting that doctor's bastard kid for four years. I checked on a website, which claimed that it cost $232,050 to raise a kid for seventeen years in the urban South. I divided that by 17, and came up with $13,650 per year, and multiplied that by the four years since Justin had been born, getting $54,600. Fuck it, I thought that it was perfectly fair to take my $54,600 out first, and then a 50/50 split of the remainder.

My attorney thought that was a bad idea, and said that, since Karen was contributing half to our income, that number should be cut in half, down to $27,300. Even with that, that was the kind of argument which would draw the stinkeye from every judge in Fayette County family court.

Since Karen's 403(b) -- the form of 401(k) for non-profit institutions like Central Baptist -- was larger than mine, I wanted enough of that to make my retirement plan even with hers. The attorney thought that was an in-court loser as well.

The biggest issue was the house. We had joint accounts, so there was no real who paid for the house issue. But, since Karen brought home more money than I did. If I tried that $54,600 argument, the judge could turn right around, look at our tax returns, and make a determination that Karen had made a larger percentage of the mortgage payments than I had, and therefore owned more than 50% of the house.

Well, I said, I could just drain out that $54,600 -- the attorney corrected me, $27,300 -- out of our accounts and hide it somewhere, and nobody would be the wiser. The attorney looked at me over his glasses and said, "You do that, and it's fraud, and the judge could very well give you wife everything, the whole house and all of your joint assets."

"Am I going to be stuck with child support for Karen's bastard?" I was getting madder and madder, and my attorney understood that I was mad at the whole situation, not him, but he wasn't too pleased.

"You can try to make the argument, but you are the legal father of Justin, because you were married to Karen not only when he was born, but throughout the pregnancy. More, with the presumed biological father now dead, he can't pay child support, and the Commonwealth has a vested interest in having a responsible father rather than a potential welfare burden."

"Karen's a nurse, and makes too good a money to qualify for welfare."

"No one knows what tomorrow might bring. Something could happen, leaving her unable to work, and that could result in welfare. I will make that argument, if you insist, but it might not go all that well for you."

I was seething inside, and it took everything I had not to lash out at the attorney. Still, it wasn't his fault; he was just telling me the truth, at least as he saw how the truth would come down in court. I knew one thing: I wasn't going to get justice from the courts. The attorney used a state child support website calculator, and guesstimated that, with my income, I'd be obligated for $1184 per month for the three kids, and $1009 if I only got stuck paying for the two who were actually mine. But even with that, the judge could set it differently, and if I got the wrong judge, my support payments could be higher or lower . . . and he doubted that lower would be an option.