I. One morning, three cops queued in front of me at Dunkin Donuts were ribbing each other gently (they were uniformed) about the usual guy kind of stuff. It was all very desultory. Two were middle-aged, the other a fresh-faced rookie. One of the older guys said something about needing to stop doing overtime because the wife was getting tired of it. Youngblood made a joke about him ending up in Family Court and the two older cops froze. Youngblood wore no wedding ring.

"Not funny," Older Cop #1 said. Quite emphatically.

Older Cop #2 just glared narrow-eyed at the youngster, too disgusted to speak.

"You will never see me in Family Court," #1 said. "Anywhere but there."

Both cops, I swear to you, shuddered at the very thought of the place, then turned their backs on the rookie, squeezing him behind them in the line.

The look on the youngster's face was pure confusion blushed bright red. Methinks he was very lucky they were all in uniform and in public. 

II. The young father and daughter at the next table had been unremarkable in their ordinary cuteness. He teased her. She exulted in his attention. They looked much as my little girl and I must have; adults having coffee, vibrating cells righteously ignored for a precious few minutes. Kids carbo-loading and sugar-happy. So similar were we, in fact, I hadn’t even consciously registered their presence just a table over just minutes before. Not until a man’s ass protruding from the front passenger side window of a SUV in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot we shared caught my distracted eye.

Trying to look without looking – this was the suburbs; it was probably nothing – my impatience turned to watchfulness while my daughter took too long with her car seat, dragging out her Mommy-monopoly sans high maintenance brother. That’s when the man’s ass backed out of the window so I could realize we’d just shared adjoining tables. He surfaced empty-handed. So he hadn’t been pearl-diving for that lollipop or dropped toy as I’d assumed, knowing all too well the discarded dignity of parents with small children. So why'd he been half-in, half-out of the car?

Odd. Mid-thirties, careful haircut. Docker-ed professional on a day off. He was too old to be horsing around with beer buddies. Not at a Donut shop mid-afternoon in any event. And…where was the little girl my subconscious suddenly reminded my frontal lobes about?

The SUV began pulling away – my lethargic brain nudged me that it had been doing so the first time, too - and his upper body disappeared inside the window again. The driver had no choice but to stop or drive off with a human hanging from the window, like those old-time drive-in food trays. This time, I made no pretense of not looking. The man popped in and out, in and out, each time the car moved in the least. By this time, it was my daughter who was impatient to leave but I thought I might have a duty to perform.

I could see the car seat in back but not the child. The more this grim game of whack-a-mole went on though, the more I could see of the driver as the car inched laboriously for the exit. A grim-faced, thirty-something woman driver shaking her head mutely, relentlessly, her lips an ever-tightening pinch that looked painful. It was as if one word spoken would cost her a million dollars. I couldn’t hear them or see his expression, but he was clearly speaking and she was just as clearly refusing to turn her head in his direction, which must explain why her attempts to drive off were so tentative. She never burned rubber while he was outside the car, which I found odd because by then, I wanted him to do something overtly violent so I could call 911. Unless this was a child-napping, car-diving was not the answer. Maybe it was a child-napping. But which of them was the criminal? It had to be him. My own lips tightened into a remorseless thin line as tight as that woman driver’s.

I couldn’t whip out my cell fast enough. By the time I’d waded through the bramble of wet wipes, discarded toys and school announcements in my purse, the car had made its halting way off the lot, man-ass more often in than out of the window, and the bastard had the nerve to make his way on foot toward me. We’d shared adjoining tables and now parking spots, as it turned out, but I wasn’t going to budge. I made sure he saw me thumbing my cell and looking daggers at him. To my surprise, when he saw me watching, he smiled.

Son of a bitch.

No matter how I glared, he kept the same smile on his face, a smile so confusing I stopped after 9-1.

What the hell kind of smile was that from someone who would do such a thing with a child in the car, and who would smile in such a situation? I simply couldn’t figure that smile out. Grin never flagging, the man drove calmly away.

With my daughter whining now to get underway, I drove distractedly, trying to figure out what I’d just witnessed. That smile….

It wasn’t a shit-eating grin. He wasn’t gloating and he wasn’t embarrassed. Not a smug, insulting or threatening ‘whatcha gonna do about it, woman?’ smile. Not feigned nonchalance or mind your own business. Then I placed it.

It was a dazed smile. An amazed smile. He'd shocked himself with his own behavior; I doubt I'd even registered to him.

Joe Average couldn’t believe what he had just done. Had anyone ever told him he was capable of such a thing -- dangerously, ignominously waggling his ass out of a moving car window for long minutes with his child inside -- he’d have thought them an idiot.

The guy had no idea that he was capable of something that had to be bizarrely out of character for him – why hoist yourself through the window of a moving vehicle with your kid in the car seat? Even without the kid! I’m betting this was something of which he’d never believed himself capable. Something that only one phenomenon could cause: divorce drama. 

I knew then that that was what I'd just seen. And I knew there was no way to know who was at fault though everyone would have a sanctimonious, uninformed opinion - feminists, misogynists, the father's rights brigade, judges, attorneys, CPS workers and court-appointed law guardians. Most of all, smug, no-knothing John Q. "won't someone please think of the children?" Public. A smug opinion just like the one I'd had - borderline-violent non-custodial Dad trying to force himself on a long-suffering ex - until I saw the look on his face. A look I know I've had on my own in the past seven Family Court years when I'd just done something of which I'd have never believed myself possible. Something that only the hell of divorce could have made possible in both us and millions of fellow sufferers. 

Now, instead of that evil eye and uninformed condemnation -- and even if he'd been in the wrong in that moment -- I wished I’d caught his eye sympathetically over our car roofs and said, “Divorce sucks, doesn’t it?”