My wife bragged she’d hire the meanest divorce lawyer in the state and leave me with nothing.

My wife bragged she’d hire the meanest divorce lawyer in the state and leave me with nothing.

My wife bragged she’d hire the meanest divorce lawyer in the state and leave me with nothing, so I hired her mother. Brianna walked into that mediation room, saw who was sitting next to me, and stopped so hard her sunglasses slid down her nose. Mom? Barb Sorensen didn’t even look up from her coffee. She was reading something in a manila folder with her glasses on a beaded chain, and she turned a page before she answered.

Hi, sweetheart. Sit down. You’re on the clock. And so is he. It was a Tuesday morning in August, in a conference room on the fourth floor of an office building downtown, with a view of a parking ramp and a ficus that had given- up years ago there was a plate of grocery store cookies in the middle of the table that nobody was going to touch there was a box of tissues next to the cookies which is how you know it’s a divorce mediation and not a real estate closing brianna just stood there in the doorway she dressed for war white blazer big gold earrings her hair blown out the way she only does for weddings she

had spent six months telling everyone we knew that she was going to walk out of this room with everything and she had walked in and found her own mother sitting in my corner if you’d told me in march that it would come to this i’d have told you that you were crazy In March, I didn’t even have a lawyer.

In March, I couldn’t get a lawyer in Des Moines to take my phone call. Some context. I’m Mike. I’m 38. I fix furnaces and air conditioners for a living, which in Iowa means I’m either in somebody’s attic in July or somebody’s basement in January and never anywhere in between. Brianna and I had been married nine years.

She was a dental hygienist. We had a house on the north side, a beagle named Pickles, and an 18-foot fishing boat that I bought, used, and spent two winters rebuilding in the garage. Barb Sorensen is Brianna’s mother. 63, and she’s practiced family law in Des Moines for 31 years. Other lawyers call her the butcher. I have heard this with my own ears from a lawyer at a Hy-Vee who saw her in the checkout line and physically turned his card around.

Brianna hasn’t spoken to her in six years. It was over a food truck. In 2019, Brianna decided she was going to open a food truck that only sold soup, and she needed Barb to co-sign a $40,000 loan. Barb asked some questions. Barb asked, among other things, when she planned to open. July, Brianna said. Barb asked who wanted to buy soup in July in Iowa.

Brianna said, that was exactly the kind of negativity that held people back. And Barb said the loan was a no, and Brianna blocked her number that same afternoon. Blocked her on everything. Facebook, Instagram, email. Stopped coming to Christmas. Didn’t go to Barb’s 60th birthday, which I did because I was raised to go to things.

About a month after the soup fight, my phone rang on a Saturday night. It was Barb. I’d never gotten a phone call from her that wasn’t about Thanksgiving logistics. She said, I know she won’t talk to me. I’m not calling to ask you to fix that. I just want to know she’s okay.

Would you have breakfast with me once in a while? I said sure. I didn’t know what else to say. So the next Sunday at 7 a.m., I met my mother-in-law at Wally’s Diner on Hickman Road. It’s the kind of place with a counter and red stools and a waitress named Honey who calls everybody Han. We each ordered a short stack. Barb ordered a side of bacon for the table and pushed half of it across to me without saying anything.

And that was that. We did it every other Sunday for six years. Two short stacks and one side of bacon, split. She’d ask how Brianna was doing, and I’d tell her the truth, or the parts of it that were mine to tell. She’d ask about- work, I’d ask about hers. Once a week, usually on Tuesdays, I’d text her a picture of pickles, because Barb had never once met pickles and I thought she should know her daughter’s dog.

I never told Brianna. The first time, it was because I didn’t know how. After that, it was because it had been going on too long to explain. When I left on Sunday mornings, I said I was going to breakfast, which was true. On March 2nd over takeout lo mein, Brianna told me she wanted a divorce. She didn’t cry. She’d clearly rehearsed it.

She’d been unhappy for a long time, she said. She felt stuck. She needed to find herself. She said all of this looking at a spot on the wall behind my head. I asked if there was somebody else. She said that was exactly the kind of question she expected from me. Then she put down her chopsticks and said the thing I’ve never forgotten.

I’m going to hire the meanest divorce lawyer in the state, she said. And you are going to walk out of this with the clothes on your back and that stupid dog if you’re lucky. I asked who the meanest lawyer in the state was. Chad Strand, she said. Like she’d won something. You know Chad Strand.

If you’ve ever driven on I-235 through Des Moines, you know Chad Strand. He’s on the billboard by the Kiyosakwa Way Ex- it. 40 feet tall, pointing right at you like you owe him money. Big teeth, suit that’s a little too shiny. Underneath him it says, divorce is war. Hire a general. I had never once thought about that billboard as something that could happen to me.

The next morning, I started calling lawyers. The first one was a firm on Grand Avenue that my buddy used when he split from his wife. The receptionist took my name and my wife’s name and put me on hold for four minutes. When she came back, her voice had changed. I’m sorry, sir. The firm has a conflict and won’t be able to represent you.

A conflict? What conflict? I’m not able- to discuss that. I can give you the number for the bar’s referral service. The second firm said the same thing. The third firm said the same thing, almost word for word, and I was starting to feel like I was losing my mind. On the third call, I asked the receptionist, as nicely as I could, if she could just tell me what I’d done wrong.

She was young. She sounded sorry for me. She lowered her voice. You didn’t do anything, she said. Your wife came in for a consultation last week. I’m really sorry. Here’s what I learned later from Barb. In Iowa, and I think pretty much everywhere, if you sit down with a lawyer for a about your divorce and tell them your side? That lawyer can never represent your husband or your wife.

They know your secrets. It’s a conflict. And some people, when they’re getting divorced, go around and have a consultation with every good lawyer in town, one after another, just to make sure the other person can’t hire any of them. Brianna had gone to three of the best divorce lawyers in Des Moines in the space of a week.

Then she’d hired Chad. I found some lawyers who could take me. They were not the best. They were a guy in a strip mall office next to a vape shop and a woman who answered her own phone while clearly… driving. They both wanted $7,500 up front before they’d read a single page. We had about $30,000 in joint savings.

I figured I’d use some of that. I told the strip mall guy I’d get back to him. On March 16th, Brianna quit her job. She came home in the middle of the day and said she’d given notice at the dental office. She said the stress of the divorce had made it impossible for her to work. She said she’d been having panic attacks.

She started sleeping until noon. She’d come out of the bedroom around 1 in her robe, eat cereal standing at the counter, and go back in. I didn’t know it yet, but that was step two. That Sunday, I met Barb at Wally’s like always. I decided not to tell her anything. It wasn’t my place, I figured. It was her daughter. I lasted about 40 seconds.

Barb put down her menu, which she’s had memorized for six years and reads every time anyway, and looked at me over the top of her glasses. What happened? Nothing. Mike, I’ve been reading faces across a table for 31 years. You look like somebody ran over your dog. Pickles is fine. Pickles is fine. Then what happened? So I told her. The lamain.

The meanest lawyer in the state. The three phone calls. The receptionist. Barb listened to all- of it with her hands folded on the table. When I got to the part about the three firms, she held up one finger. Let me guess, she said, and she named all three of them. In order, I stared at her. It’s an old trick, she said.

It’s the oldest trick there is. She’s not smart enough to think of it on her own, so she didn’t. Chad told her to do it. That’s his move. He sends his clients around town like a burglar casing houses. Honey came and topped off our coffee. Barb waited until she was gone. I’ll take your case, she said. I almost laughed. Barb, she’s your daughter.

I’m aware. I can’t do that. I can’t have you sitting across from your own daughter in a room. Why not? She said. She won’t sit across from me anywhere else. I told her no. I told her I appreciated it. I told her I’d find somebody or I’d represent myself if I had to. Barb took off her glasses and let them hang on the chain.

Mike, she said, let me tell you what Chad Strand does to men who represent themselves. He lets them talk. He lets them talk and talk in depositions and at hearings and in mediation and every single thing they say out of hurt feelings he writes down and uses. By the end of it, the judge thinks you’re a hothead, your wife thinks she’s a victim, and you’re paying her half your paycheck for six years.

I’ve watched him do it. I’ve watched him do it to good men. I still said no. She didn’t argue. She put her glasses back on and read her menu and ordered the short stack like always. When the bacon came, she pushed half of it across to me. And before she got up to leave, she took a pen out of her purse and wrote her personal cell number on a napkin, which I already had, and she tapped it twice with her finger.

When you change your mind, she said, I changed my mind on April 9th. I got paid on the 9th. My paycheck always goes into our joint account by direct deposit at midnight, and the mortgage comes out automatically that morning. At about 10 a.m., my phone buzzed with a text from the bank. Insufficient funds. Mortgage payment returned.

I pulled into the bank parking lot on my lunch break, still in my work shirt. I stood at the counter and asked the teller to pull up the account. She turned the monitor so I could see it. The savings was at $800 and some dollars. The day before, it had been over $30,000. A cashier’s check had been drawn that morning at a branch across town.

$22,000. The teller clicked on it, and a little picture of the check came up on the screen. Pay to the order of Strand Law. Then Brianna had moved the rest of it into her own checking account, one she’d opened in January that I didn’t know about. My paycheck had landed in an empty account and gone straight back out to the mortgage company and bounced.

I sat in my van in the parking lot for a long time. I watched a guy in the next spot try to parallel park a Suburban for five minutes. I thought about the two winters I spent on that boat. I thought about pickles. Then I took the napkin out of my wallet, where I’d been keeping it, and I called Barb. She picked up on the first ring.

She didn’t say hello. What did she take? 22,000, I said, to Chad. Barb was- quiet for about two seconds okay she said here’s what we’re going to do don’t touch any of the money don’t move anything back don’t call her don’t text her i know you want to write down the date the time and the amount on a piece of paper and put it in your glove box the judge will count every dollar at the end the husbands who grab money back in the middle are the husbands who lose you hear me i hear you and i’m going to call the state bar this afternoon about me representing you she said so that nobody can ever say we didn’t it turns out that’s allowed a lawyer can represent somebody in

a divorce against her own kid as long as she’s never represented the kid, and as long as the client understands exactly what it means and agrees to it in writing. Barb called the ethics line at the state bar. She wrote up a waiver that was four pages long and explained, in plain English, every possible way it could go badly.

She made me read the whole thing out loud in her office with her sitting there, and she made me initial every page. When I got to the end, I looked up. Is it weird that I feel like I’m the one who should be asking you if you’re sure? She took the pen out of my hand and signed the bottom of the last page.

I’ve been sure for six years, she said. Brianna filed on April 16th. I got served in a basement. I was on my back under a 40-year-old Lennox furnace at Mrs. Hoogland’s house on Beaver Avenue, trying to figure out why her flame sensor kept going out. Mrs.

Hoogland is 91 and has been a customer of ours since before I was born, and she makes me drink a glass of buttermilk every time I come over, whether I want it or not. She came down the basement steps holding the railing and said there was a young man at the door for me. It was a processed server with a clipboard and very nice sneakers. He handed me the papers, said, you’ve been served, have a good one, and left. I stood in Mrs.

Hoogland’s front hall reading my own divorce petition. She read it over my shoulder. She didn’t even pretend not to. Well, she said, that’s a shame. You want your buttermilk? I went back down and fixed her furnace. The flame sensor was coated in gunk from 20 years of dust. I cleaned it with a strip of emery cloth, reset the board, and watched the burners light up blue and steady.

It took 12 minutes. Some days, it’s the only thing that goes right. Then, the rumors started. Brianna had apparently decided that the reason our marriage was over was that I was cheating on her. She had Every other Sunday, at 7 in the morning, I snuck out of the house. And every other Sunday, I came back smelling like maple syrup.

She told her friends. She told our neighbors. She told the woman across the street who runs the neighborhood Facebook group. And I found out when Mr. Dietz next door stopped me at the mailbox and asked, very gently, if I was seeing somebody at a pancake house. Then it got to work.

We were loading the van one morning, and my co-worker Gator, who is a very large man and not a subtle one, asked me in front of three other guys whether the syrup lady was hot. I’d like to tell you I laughed. I did not laugh. I walked around to the other side of the van and stood there for a second with my hand on the ladder rack. I’m not proud of what I did next. That week, I changed the Wi-Fi password in the house and didn’t tell her.

I moved to the couch, which was fine, but I took Pickles’ blanket with me. The good fleece one with the paw prints. Pickles followed the blanket because Pickles is a beagle and has no loyalty to anything but warmth. Brianna had to listen to her own dog snoring in the living room every night. I told Barb about it at Wally’s that Sunday.

I think I expected her to laugh. She didn’t. She set down her fork. Stop it, she said. Today. Give her the password and put the blanket back. Barb, come on. It’s a Wi-Fi password. It’s a Wi-Fi password today, she said. In three months, it’s Chad Strand standing up in mediation, saying you cut off his client’s internet and stole her emotional support animal.

Petty is expensive, Mike. I can win you a fair divorce. I can’t win you one where you act like him. I gave Brianna the password that night. I put the blanket back on the bed. Pickles followed it. The traitor. In May, the boat left. I came home from work one day. and the trailer was gone from the side of the garage.

Brianna said she’d had it taken out to the marina at Sailorville Lake for the season. She said she was going to use it, since she had so much free time now that she couldn’t work. I’d rebuilt that boat’s transom with my own hands. I’d rewired the whole thing.

But the papers said don’t fight about property until mediation, and Barb said write it down, so I wrote it down. I kept waiting for the bill for the slip rental to show up. The marina charges for a slip by the season, and it’s not cheap. The bill never came. Not to me. Not to the house. I asked Barb about it. Barb said, huh.

Then she said, what are you doing Saturday? That Saturday morning in June, Barb picked me up in her Buick at 6.30. She had a thermos of coffee, two blueberry muffins in a bag, and a pair of binoculars that she told me had belonged to her late husband who used to watch birds. We drove up to Sailorville and parked in the lot above the marina where you can see the docks and the ramp and the whole curve of the water.

We waited. It was very peaceful. Barb did a crossword. At about 9.15, Chad Strand walked down the dock in boat shoes and a visor. He was carrying a cooler. Behind him carried Two towels and a bottle of sunscreen was my wife. They climbed into my boat. My boat. With the blue stripe I painted myself. Chad got in the driver’s seat like he’d done it a hundred times.

He turned the key, and even from the parking lot, I could hear that the motor didn’t sound like my motor. It was too quiet and too smooth. Barb handed me the binoculars. The motor on the back of my boat wasn’t my old 75 horsepower. It was brand new. Shiny black. With a cover that still had that fresh plastic look.

Much bigger. Much more expensive. Chad backed out of the slip, and Brianna put her feet up on the dash, and they went- roaring out across the lake. Barb wrote something in the margin of her crossword. When they were gone, she got out of the car and walked down to the fuel dock. I followed her.

There was a kid working the pumps in a marina t-shirt, maybe 19 with a sunburned nose. Hi, Junior, Barb said. Hi, Mrs. Sorenson. It turned out Junior was her next-door neighbor’s grandson. He mows her lawn. She taught him how to drive stick. He was very happy to see her. Barb asked him about the blue-striped boat in slip 14. Junior said, Oh, that guy.

That guy was out there every single Saturday since May, first thing in the morning. He’d asked Junior to make sure nobody took the slip like he owned the place. He always paid for gas with the same card. He tips okay, Junior said. Not great. Do you know who put that new motor on it? Barb asked. Junior pointed at the marine dealer’s shop across the lot, a big metal building with a sign that said service and sales.

They put on almost all of them, he said. On the drive back, Barb explained what she was going to do. She was going to send the marine dealer a subpoena, which is a legal demand for their records. They’d have to hand over the paperwork for any work done on a boat with that hull number. Every boat had has a hull number. It’s like a serial number on a car.

Mine was on my title, in my name, and on Brianna’s. Three weeks later, I was sitting in Barb’s office, and she slid a piece of paper across her desk to me. It was an invoice. A 115 horsepower outboard motor, installed. Rigging, controls, labor. Total $21,800. Date of sale, April 9th. The hull number of the boat was my hull number, and in the box that said purchaser, it said Strandlaw. April 9th.

The same day, $22,000 left our savings account as a cashier’s check. to Strandlaw. I read it three times. He bought a motor, I said, with our money, for my boat. For the boat he’s asking the court to give his client, Barb said, so that he can keep driving it. Then she explained the part that made her smile.

When a client pays a lawyer a retainer, the lawyer isn’t allowed to just spend it. It has to go into a special account for client money, called a trust account, and it stays there until the lawyer actually does the work. You can’t take a client’s $22,000 and buy yourself anything with it, let alone a motor.

And, Barb said, holding up a second finger, in Iowa, a lawyer is not allowed to start a romantic relationship with a client he’s currently representing. It’s in the rules. It’s a very short rule. Chad didn’t read it. How do you know they’re Mike? She said. She put her feet up on the dash of your boat. A few days later, Barb came by the house to pick up the title to the boat, which was in my file cabinet in the garage.

Brianna was out at a spa in West Des Moines, according to her Instagram, the one I was pretty sure I’d paid for. It was the first time Barb had set foot in our house in six years. She stood in the front hall for a second with her purse held in front of her in both hands. She looked at the way. picture on the wall, the one of Brianna and me on the steps of the church, and she didn’t say anything about it. Then Pickles came around the corner.

Pickles is a beagle, which means Pickles has never met a stranger in her life. She came skidding down the hall on the hardwood with her ears flying and her whole back end wagging, and she did not slow down, and she ran straight into Barb’s shins. Barb looked down at her. Well, she said, hello, I know you.

She set her purse down on the floor. She crouched, which I’d never seen her do, with one hand on the wall for balance. Pickles put both front paws on knee and licked her chin. And Barb, the butcher, a woman who has made grown lawyers turn their grocery carts around, sat down right there on my hallway floor in her good slacks and let a 30-pound beagle climb into her lap.

She scratched behind Pickles’ ears for a long time without saying anything. Then she said very quietly, not really to me. She got a dog and she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know what to say to that. So I went and got the title out of the garage and took my time about it. When I came back, Barb was on her feet again with her purse over her arm and her face exactly the way it always is.

She took the title. looked at the whole number and put it in her folder. Tuesdays, she said at the door. Don’t you ever miss a Tuesday. A week before mediation, Brianna’s demands arrived in writing. Barb read them to me over pancakes. She wanted the house. She wanted the boat. She wanted pickles. And she wanted $3,200 a month in alimony because the stress of the marriage had left her.

And this was an exact quote, unable to currently work. I asked Barb if that was bad. Barb poured syrup on her pancakes very slowly. It’s wonderful, she said. So that’s how I ended up in that conference room on the fourth floor, with the dead ficus and the cookies, watching my wife stand frozen in the doorway looking at her mother.

Chad Strand came in behind her, and I got to see something I will treasure until I die. I got to see Chad Strand’s face when he saw who was sitting next to me. He actually took a step back, a physical step. Bro knew exactly who she was. This is a conflict of interest, he said. She can’t represent him. She’s the mother.

Barb sipped her coffee. I called the state bar, Chadwick, she said. The conflict is his to wave, and he waved it in writing. Four pages, initialed. Sit down before you hurt your- He sat. Brianna sat too, finally, at the far end of the table, as far from her mother as the room would allow. She didn’t look at Barb. She didn’t look at me.

She looked at the cookies. The mediator was a tired man named Mr. Ingram. He was a retired district judge with 19 years on the bench, and he had the face of a man who’d heard every version of every story ever told about a marriage. He cleared his throat and read Brianna’s demands out loud. The house, the boat, the dog.

Three two hundred dollars a month in alimony, because Brianna, quote, cannot currently work. Barb set her cup down. Cannot. She said. She said. She said. hand a little like a kid in the back of class. That was me, Barb said. The room went so quiet I could hear the air conditioning, which I’m pretty sure was a carrier and was running too cold. Wally’s Diner on Hickman Road, Barb said.

Two short stacks and a side of bacon. We split the bacon. He’s been having breakfast with me for six years because he was the only person in my family who still picked up my calls. Brianna opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She looked like a video buffering on hotel Wi-Fi. Six years? She finally said. Behind my back? You blocked my number, baby, Barb said.

Front. Back. You weren’t looking either way. He sends me pictures of the dog every Tuesday. She slid her phone across the table, open to an album. It was called Pickles. There were 311 pictures in it. I have a whole album, Barb said. He’s a very good boy. Chad jumped in. He’d recovered a little. He had his lawyer voice back. Regardless of any of that, he said, my client is entitled to the boat.

Oh, the boat, Barb said. And she smiled. And I swear the temperature in that room dropped 10 degrees. Let’s talk about the boat, Chad. You’ve been on it more than he has. Chad froze. Sailorville Lake. Barb said. Every Saturday since May. Slip 14. The kid at the fuel dock is my neighbor’s grandson. You two were out there so often he started saving you a slip.

Brianna turned and looked at her own lawyer. Chad looked at the ceiling like it might open up and take him. So let me get this straight, Mr. Ingram said slowly. He took his glasses off. Your lawyer is your boyfriend? It’s not like that, Brianna said. It is a little like that, Barb said. And here’s my favorite part. She opened the manila folder and took out the invoice and laid it on the table facing Mr.

Ingram. On April 9th, the week before she fired- $22,000 left the joint savings account as a cashier’s check to Strand Law. It was supposed to be a retainer, which means it was supposed to go into Chad’s trust account and sit there. Same day, Strand Law paid $21,800 for a new outboard motor installed on this boat.

She tapped the hull number, the boat she’s asking for, so he gets to keep driving it. I actually heard Chad swallow. It was a real sound, like a drain. Mr. Ingram looked at the invoice for a long time. Then he rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger like a man whose whole Tuesday had just been ruined.

Barb laid it out in about four minutes flat. The $22,000 comes back into the marital estate within 30 days, or she files a complaint about Chad with the attorney disciplinary board, with the invoice and the marina records attached, and she asks the judge to count every dollar of it against Brianna’s half.

Brianna keeps her car and half the equity in the house. I keep the house and the dog, and I pay her half the equity over two years. Nobody gets alimony because nobody is disabled, they’re just dating their lawyer. And the boat, Chad asked, very quietly, sell it, Barb said, split it, and Chad, buy your own motor next time.

Brianna signed. She didn’t read it. She just signed where Chad pointed, and then Chad signed as her lawyer, which I am pretty sure was the worst moment of his professional life. He left without his billboard smile. He didn’t even say goodbye to Mr. Ingram. Brianna got all the way to the door. Then she stopped, and she turned around, and for the first time in six years, she looked straight at her mother. You picked him over me, Mom, she said.

Barb looked at her for a long second. I watched something go across her face that I’d never seen there before. Not once, not in six years of pancakes. Then it was gone. No, honey, she said. I picked the one who showed up. Brianna left. Then it was just the two of us in that little room with the cookies and the dead ficus.

I asked Barb how much I owed her. I’d been afraid to ask for four months. She reached into her purse and pulled out a napkin. She wrote on it with her pen, folded it once, and slid it across the table to me. It said, Sunday, Wally’s, 7am, you’re buying the bacon.