Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  “Yeah, it’s for her,” I said, because I had stalled as long as I could.

  Mom dropped the pen on the couch and spun away from me. She stopped in front of the television, swiped at the volume knob, and suddenly I could hear the moths hitting the window. She insisted that burglars didn’t break into a well-lit house, but the floodlight brought the bugs by the hundreds.

  “You never get me fun gifts,” she said.

  That wasn’t true. On Mother’s Day two years earlier I’d gotten her a hilarious oven mitt that said One Hot Mama. She didn’t even smile when she opened the box. She stuffed it in a drawer and never took it out again, and so last Mother’s Day I got her candy-covered almonds like usual and she was much happier.

  I watched the flying bodies smack against the glass, one after another.

  Mom said more stuff, following me as I put the pen back in the side pocket of my purse. I imagined handing it to Lucia and how she tipped her head back when she laughed, like there was something funny overhead. I imagined leaving it on her doorstep, and I thought of the dusty gasoline smell of her carport.

  Eventually Mom went to her bedroom, and I finished watching my show. That was how our nights worked: I picked my words carefully, but never carefully enough.

  It wasn’t a bad ending.

  Some nights were worse.

  II.

  The day before I met Lucia, my mother took her car into Mosely Brothers because the brakes were sticking, and she did that voice she does like, Oh goodness me, what is this strange contraption they call a car? How am I ever to understand its complicated pieces? I think I have a problem with this part called, oh, the brake? Brakes? Am I saying that right? Giggle giggle shrug smile. I cannot even imagine how you know all these big words, you impressive man in overalls, and won’t you please oh please fix it for me?

  That’s a slight exaggeration.

  But I said to her while we were sitting in the Mosely Brothers waiting room, with its light-up Coke machine and half-empty pot of coffee, “You’re smart, Mom. Why do you act like you don’t know anything?”

  She cried. Right there in the waiting room.

  Lucia had hot pink fingernails, shining, and my mother was big on never painting your nails brighter than a pale peach. Lucia’s eyes were deep and dark, and all the women in my family except for me had blue eyes. She was like someone out of a fairy tale, only in a suit.

  She talked to me and she knew about movies, and right there in her lobby I wondered—I mean, I was only thirteen, so I didn’t have the right words, but it was something like—

  Is this how you can be?

  Lucia wasn’t afraid of anything.

  You have to understand that on the day before a road trip, which usually meant visiting my grandmother in Huntsville, Mom always went to a full-service gas station to get the tires checked. I was unaware that women could use self-service gas stations. I had no idea that tire gauges were sold in stores.

  Mom never drove on the interstate. She never drove at night.

  My grandmother and aunt followed these rules as well. There were others. You never called a boy, even if it was to ask about a homework assignment. If you wanted to make a rum cake and you were out of rum, you needed to call up an uncle or a husband or a father, because a woman alone was not safe at a liquor store. (I imagined liquor stores as something out of Mad Max, with barbed wire and dust storms and men in spiked helmets whirring chains through the air.) You should never swim in the ocean because of riptides. Never leave your car without checking twice that you locked it. Never sleep on your face because you’ll get wrinkles. Never wear your bathing suit into the front yard to get the mail, because what if Mr. Cleary next door sees you? Never go to Kmart in cutoff shorts, even if you’re in the middle of gardening and only need more potting soil, because what if someone sees you? Never stand at the bar in a restaurant, even if you’re waiting for a table, because what if someone sees you?

  I always wanted to ask, What happens next? After they see you?

  Once I stopped by to see Lucia on a Saturday, and she was weeding her flower beds without makeup. Not even foundation. I never saw my mother without makeup unless she was ready for bed.

  Women in my family were afraid of everything.

  An office lobby is a flat, cardboard kind of place, and an office lobby is all I had of Lucia at first. She changed for me when I saw her in her house. Like when you pull a Barbie out of her box, and for a while it’s enough to stare at her tiny shoes and the blue slivers of her eye shadow, but eventually she’s only a doll propped up on the carpet. But if you get her a Dreamhouse—and maybe a Corvette—then she has some substance. You can build her a whole life. You can sit back and watch her as she moves from room to room and turns on her record player and picks up the phone to make plans and solve problems. That was what Lucia’s house did. It let me move my imaginary Lucia around, room to room.

  I added Bard, and he was another helpful piece. Was that how it was to be married? Because it wasn’t what I’d seen. They laughed. They talked like someone had written their lines for them, sharp and quick.

  Where did the pile of dog towels go? Lucia would say.

  In the washer, Bard would say.

  In the washer with our towels? Where do you think the dog hair goes, Evan?

  It gets washed, Lucia.

  It gets washed right onto our towels! Do we really have to go over this again?

  We don’t have to go over it again. It’s a washer. It washes.

  They would go on like that forever. They argued about the longest street in Montgomery and whether you had to count only streets within the city limits or whether you could include Montgomery County. They argued over whether a wombat is a marsupial. They never argued about anything real.

  Why can’t you just try harder? I heard Mom ask Dad once, toward the end. If you wanted to be happy, you’d be happy.

  I don’t think I can be happy while I’m with you, he’d said, and I suppose that wasn’t exactly an argument, was it?

  Once I got my license, I came by more often than Lucia knew. My only rule was that I couldn’t go by more than twice a week. She worked late a lot. Sometimes, when her car was gone, I barely slowed down. Other times I parked at the curb and went through the motions of knocking on the kitchen door. It was an excuse to look through the window. I could see the copper pots dangling from the hooks over the stove. I could see the spice rack. Her kitchen was nothing like ours—nothing of hers was like anything of ours. At home everything was too hard or too worn down, too clean or too grimy. Our couch and chairs were wooden armed, impossible for napping, and polish drenched every inch of wooden furniture. Once I had to set a piece of lemon cake on the coffee table for a second, and when I bit into it, the polish had soaked into it like sauce.

  In Lucia’s house, everything made you want to touch it. The cranberry-colored carpet was soft under your feet. The chunk of driftwood felt like an ancient bone. The den lamps had silver leaves with dangling crystals, and when you set a drink on the end table, the crystals swayed. Lucia cut flowers from the yard and put them in vases. She had wine bottles in a pyramid. I’d never seen anyone drink a glass of wine other than on TV. (Did it involve a trip to the liquor store? Did she go by herself?)

  Mom liked Elvis, but we only listened in the car. Oldies 106.9. Lucia played the blues, and she always lifted the arm of the record player with one finger. The records had names I’d never heard—Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker and Pinetop Perkins, and I tried to learn them but I never managed because how can you listen at the same time you’re talking?

  The music sat in the air, more like a smell than a sound.

  The books took up one whole wall, with shelves from the floor to the ceiling. We had bookshelves at home, but they were filled with bowls of potpourri and Mom’s endless figurines. Lucia gave me Alas, Babylon and Animal Farm and The Fountainhea
d. Before I met her, I mostly read Dad’s old paperbacks with their covers of cowboys and sunsets and sword-holding men and women wearing fur and daggers. Robert E. Howard—oh, I spent a lot of nights with Conan, wishing I could slip into his world, and I would be the fiercest kind of woman warrior, riding horses and slitting throats and eating roasted mammals that I’d killed with my own hands. Lucia’s books didn’t have massive thews or volcanic blue eyes, but I’d open the pages, knowing she had read the same words, and I’d swallow them whole at night—or they’d swallow me—and Mom was a universe away, watching reruns of Bewitched.

  III.

  After Sunday dinner at Aunt Molly’s, I pulled up by the curb at Lucia’s. Evan’s car was gone, and the house was dark. I was equal parts relieved and disappointed. I had suspected they didn’t go to church, but maybe they went somewhere with late services? Maybe they were having lunch in a fellowship hall somewhere or waiting for the check at Red Lobster?

  I hoped they’d gone to church.

  I knocked on the door anyway, standing in the carport with my forehead against the window, staring past the reflection of my Laura Ashley dress with tomato sauced dripped down the front. I imagined some future version of myself inside Lucia’s den, coming home and pouring myself a glass of tea—no, wine—and then falling asleep on the sofa. I watched my sleeping self, a complete stranger. I listened to the wind chimes making their fairy sounds. When I wandered back down the driveway, I did it slowly.

  “Many will meet their doom,” I heard myself singing, “trumpets will sound. All of the dead shall rise, righteous meet in the skies—”

  It had been the closing hymn today. Even the part about eternal damnation was cheerful. I stopped at my car, keys in hand. The longer I stayed, the harder it would be to invent a believable excuse. As it was, I could tell Mom I’d stopped for gas, although she had to work this afternoon, and there was a chance that she was already headed to flip around the open sign at Barre None and sell leotards and toe shoes to a bunch of ballerinas.

  I spun away from my car, heading down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from Aunt Molly’s house. I had never turned right when I left Lucia’s house. I had no destination. I was only taking one step after another, and within a few houses, the street seemed unfamiliar.

  The sermon today had been about Noah and the blessings of righteousness, and I’d partly listened but I’d also figured out a long time ago that if I kept reading past the verses the pastor quoted, I’d find the good parts. Like the chapter about Noah starts with an announcement that in those days “Nephilim” were on the earth, and the “sons of God” had children with the “daughters of men,” and those children grew up to be heroes. So what the heck was a Nephilim? It was like the writer got off track and started a fantasy novel in the middle of the Bible. There was an entire world buried in that verse, and—even when I asked—every Sunday-School teacher shrugged and skipped right past it.

  They skipped past the part after the flood when Noah got drunk and passed out naked, and they skipped the part in Leviticus about how to deal with men’s discharges and semen. (I wished someone would explain what men discharged besides semen.) Pastors loved to talk about how Lot’s disobedient wife was turned into a pillar of salt, but what about the part where two angels visited Lot’s home, and a mob of men demanded he hand over the angels to be raped? And then Lot offered up his two virgin daughters to be raped instead? Those same daughters later got their father drunk, had sex with him, and wound up pregnant.

  “Are you reading your Bible every night?” my grandmother loved to ask me, and I wondered if she had any idea what was actually in the thing.

  I could hear the martins in the trees. Away from my usual path, every step seemed sharp and clear and foreign. The concrete was mottled with leaf shadows and smashed crepe myrtle blossoms the pinks and purples of Hubba Bubba. A worm, dried out. Tiny volcanoes of anthills.

  “Troublesome times are here,” I sang, starting over from the beginning, “filling men’s hearts with fear. Freedom we all hold dear now is at stake.”

  Today the pastor had stood in the pulpit and explained how God’s deep disappointment in mankind forced him to flood the earth and obliterate nearly everyone on it. We taught toddlers about those cute animals walking two by two, but God wiped out, maybe, thousands of kids and parents and grandparents. Or was it millions? We never talked about the slaughtered ones. We talked about Noah and the blessings of righteousness.

  “Aren’t we lucky,” the pastor had said, smiling. He was a gentle man, not like those angry preachers in movies. “Aren’t we lucky to be born here? To be born into the right families at the right time and place? Think of some African tribesman, born in the dirt, who never even hears the name of Jesus. Who never has the chance to be redeemed. We are blessed, brothers and sisters. We are chosen.”

  It was a pleasant thought as long as you didn’t think about all the people—tribesmen or otherwise—roasting in hell.

  Everyone has their role.

  It was one of the pastor’s favorite lines. A congregation follows its elders. Children obey their parents. A woman is a helpmeet to her husband.

  Alice and Gus Rogers sat across the aisle from me, shushing their six kids, who were all a little strange because they weren’t allowed to watch television. The Rogerses had been missionaries in Africa for years, and if we believed everyone who was unbaptized would burn in hell, shouldn’t more of us be like them, strange or not? Shouldn’t we head out to convert all the Africans or Asians or Episcopalians or whatever? Instead we sat there, Sunday after Sunday.

  Everyone has their role.

  Was our role to be saved and everybody else’s role to burn?

  The whole church was lazy, like when adults find a chicken sandwich inside the Arby’s bag instead of the Beef ’n Cheddar they ordered, and they eat it because it’s too much trouble to take it back. The Rogerses sat behind my fifth-grade Sunday-School teacher, Valerie Springer, who couldn’t teach my class after that year because once we turned twelve, a woman wasn’t allowed to lead a class with boys in it. Did Mrs. Springer ever point out that women teach those same boys all day long every Monday through Friday? Did anyone ever say, hey, could we spend more time talking about these people condemned to eternal damnation? Lucia grew up Methodist, which meant she was sprinkled as a baby instead of being properly baptized, and it was impossible to imagine that she would go to hell, and yet I thought of multitudes disappearing into rising water, screaming and sobbing.

  Sometimes my thoughts twisted down these paths until I rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of something so big that I couldn’t make out its shape, and I’d have to turn away.

  A squirrel circled his way up a pecan tree, claws scrabbling against bark. I breathed in the sweetness of flowers—camellia? Honeysuckle? The sun was warm on my face, and I let it soak in.

  I took a right at a stop sign and tried to let the questions drain out of me. It was possible that I was confusing laziness with faith. On good nights, I could still close my eyes and feel God in the room with me as I prayed, and love would fill me like a balloon. In the moments between prayer and sleep I lost myself entirely, and I drifted up through the stars to him, floating away to a place I didn’t know or understand, and everything made sense.

  I wanted that feeling of floating.

  The squirrels bickered in the trees. A concrete fountain bubbled in someone’s front yard, and yellow roses curled around a fencepost. I stepped over a cracked handprint in the sidewalk, with a single yellow petal wedged into the thumb. There was nothing special about this street except that I’d never set foot on it. Now here I was wandering down the sidewalk alone, and not a single person had tried to stuff me in a van or tear off my clothes. All I’d seen were squirrels and petals and sun slashing through the leaves, and one day I’d be able to turn down any street I liked. I would take long walks and not know where I was going. I would roam for
hours and get lost and find my way back, and—finally!—the thought of it was something like closing my eyes and drifting up to the stars.

  A loud bark made me jump. The dog was just ahead of me, behind a chain-link fence that boxed off a wide backyard with a patio and tall grass. The dog bounded toward me, head as high as my shoulder, tongue hanging out, slobber spraying.

  I knew her right away, but it took a little while for me to believe I was really seeing her.

  “Moxie?” I said.

  She sproinged, tail wagging her entire body. A couple of beagle-ish dogs came running up behind her, yapping, keeping their distance from me. I turned back to Moxie and saw her red collar with her silver tag jingling back and forth. I stretched out my hand toward her, and the beagles went nuts. I was trying to reason with them, scratching Moxie’s head at the same time, when a man with a beard slid open the patio door. I nearly called out to him because this sort of thing happened in our neighborhood sometimes, especially with the Martins’ cocker spaniel, who was always bolting out of their gate. Whoever found him would plop him into their backyard.

  I’d always wondered why a dog as big as Moxie didn’t jump the fence. Maybe she’d finally done it, and this guy had found her. I could see a water bowl on the patio.

  I stepped back, though, as the man slid the door closed behind him. I didn’t call out. No good reason why. I started walking like I was only strolling past. The man waved at me, and I waved back.

  “Come on, Chewie,” he called.

  It took me a second to realize that he was talking to Moxie. He’d given her a new name.

  This man had stolen Lucia’s dog.

  Lucia