Six weeks later, on a Tuesday, somebody knocked on my apartment door at eight o’clock in the morning.
I opened it in my housecoat. A man in a polo shirt held out a thick white envelope.
“Loretta Jean Bixby?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been served.”
He walked away before I could even ask him what that meant.
I sat down at my kitchen table and opened the envelope. Inside was a stack of paper an inch thick. The first page said, at the very top, in big black letters:
WAYNE THOMAS HALLER, Plaintiff, v. LORETTA JEAN BIXBY, Defendant.
PLAINTIFF’S ORIGINAL PETITION.
I read it three times before I understood it.
Wayne Haller was suing me.
He said I had falsely imprisoned him by blocking the door of the store. He said I had assaulted him by “physically obstructing” his exit. He said I had defamed him by telling the police he was a kidnapper, when he was the child’s “lawful biological father, as documented by a certified birth certificate.” He said I had stalked him into the parking lot and photographed him and his minor child without consent, causing him “severe emotional distress, humiliation, and damage to his reputation.”
He was asking for $350,000.
Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I read that number and I had to put my head down on the kitchen table.
At the bottom, the petition was signed by a lawyer. Bradley K. Strand, of the Strand Law Group in Austin. There was a fancy logo with a scale on it.
I didn’t sleep that night either.
The next morning, I called every lawyer in the Temple phone book. The first one wanted a $15,000 retainer just to look at the case. The second one wanted $10,000 and said defamation cases “can get expensive.” The third one asked me how much I had in savings, and when I told him, he said, “Ma’am, I’d hate to see you spend your whole nest egg on this. Have you considered just settling?”
“Settling how?”
“Well. Sometimes in these cases, the other side will drop it if you sign a sworn statement retracting what you said. Saying you were mistaken.”
“But I wasn’t mistaken.”
“I’m just telling you what usually makes these go away.”
I hung up the phone.
And then I sat in Harold’s chair and asked out loud, to nobody, “Were you, Loretta? Were you mistaken?”
Because the police still hadn’t told me anything. Because Quinn and her mother hadn’t come into the store on Saturday morning. Not once in six weeks. My friend Dolores, who works the deli counter, told me so. She’d been watching for them.
And because a lawsuit with a fancy logo on it makes you doubt your own eyes.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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