Chapter 46: Signed and Entered
The civil clerk's counter is on the ground floor of the courthouse, room 108, open eight-thirty to four.
I went on the Thursday, at lunch, and used forty of my sixty minutes and half of them queuing.
The public terminals are along the back wall.
Four of them. Two work.
You search by case number or by party name.
I searched by party name and there was one result.
Dissolution of marriage.
Petitioner: Mercer, Dean R. Respondent: Mercer, Cassandra A.
The docket sheet is two pages and it is the most useful document in any file, and almost nobody asks for it.
A docket sheet is not evidence of anything. It is a list of events with dates.
Line one. Petition filed. Eleven weeks after I went in.
Line four. Return of service.
Served personally on respondent at the correctional facility, by a deputy, at 10:20 in the morning.
I remember that. A woman I had never met handed me an envelope in a corridor and asked me to sign a green card. She wore a lanyard and she was in a hurry.
I signed the green card. Of course I did.
It is a receipt for delivery. It proves nothing except that paper arrived.
Line seven. No responsive pleading filed within the time allowed.
Line eight. Motion for default.
Line nine. Default entered.
Line eleven. Decree of dissolution signed by the court on the fourth of June.
Line twelve. Decree entered and file-stamped on the twenty-fifth of June.
There it was. Twenty-one days.
Signed on the fourth. Entered on the twenty-fifth.
My question at the counter had a real answer, and the answer was three weeks.
It changes nothing about the waiver. A recital that says entered when it means signed is sloppy, not fatal.
I want to be honest about what I felt looking at those two lines, because it was not vindication.
It was the small, flat, physical satisfaction of a number resolving. The same feeling as a page count coming out right.
I paid a dollar a page and took a copy of the docket sheet and a copy of the decree.
Nine pages. Nine dollars. I had eleven.
The decree itself is six pages of standard language and one page that matters.
Paragraph fourteen. The marital residence at 118 Delham Street is awarded to the Petitioner, subject to further order of the court.
Subject to further order of the court.
Those six words are why a man in a supplier's jacket was standing on Kesler Street at five to eight in the morning.
An underwriter had run title on 14 Ashcroft Lane for a refinance and pulled the chain back, and somewhere in that chain is a decree that awarded a house to one party and then left the door open.
A title company will not insure over an open door. They will ask for a waiver from the other party.
The other party is me.
I sat in room 108 with nine warm pages on my knee and worked that out in about four minutes.
Then I sat there another six minutes not working anything out.
Because here is what those six words actually meant, stripped of the procedure.
For six years I had been a person things were done to.
Forms arrived. I signed them or they proceeded without me.
And now there was a transaction, worth several hundred thousand dollars, involving a house I have never entered, that could not close without my signature.
Not my consent. Not my forgiveness. My signature, in ink, in front of a notary, with a date beside it.
I did not feel powerful. I want to be very clear about that, because this is the point where the story wants me to.
What I felt was the specific alertness of somebody who has just found the load-bearing page in a file.
At two minutes to one I stopped, put the copies in my bag, and walked back to Kesler Street.
I was seven minutes late. Marisol wrote 1:07 on the sheet in blue pen and turned it round so I could watch.
I said, “Courthouse.”
She said, “I know. You came back with paper.”
That night I did not read the waiver again. It stayed in the notebook with the others.
I got the four hundred and twelve pages out from under the bunk instead.
I moved the cardboard box to do it.
Six envelopes, all the same handwriting, all still sealed.
I put the box on the end of the bed and did not look at it, and I took the black clip off the file.
Not to read it. To reorder it.
Because I had been reading it as my life, and my life is the one document I am worst at reading.
I was going to read it as what it actually was.
A badly assembled file.