Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  I.

  The drive to Andalusia took a little over an hour, and—in spite of herself—Lucia felt a rush of giddiness when she turned onto her old street: the Hoovers’ magnolia trees, which she’d climbed so often, tearing off seed pods and pretending they were grenades. The dead end where she’d learned to ride a bike, with the ear-shaped patch of rough asphalt that still called to her with the thunk-thunk of front and back wheel; the fig tree at the Colliers’ where she’d tossed pinched-off fig stems into the zoysia grass.

  It was an illogical giddiness, like waking up and seeing snow out the windows—no school!—before remembering that she had to work regardless. She saw her parents at least once a month. This was no great homecoming. This was not even home.

  Mr. Dorian’s VW Rabbit, freshly waxed in the driveway.

  Bright blue shutters on a chalk-white house. She’d seen skinny little Harold Stinton in that yard a hundred times, pestering someone to toss a grape, and he’d catch it in his mouth, braces flashing. His cargo plane had been shot down in Khe Sanh, and Lucia’s mother had whispered the word “fireball.”

  Julie Bartlett, two years older than Lucia, was watering the begonias in front of the house where she’d grown up. If Lucia floated above the trees, she could point to the homes of a dozen girls who’d gone to school with her, who were all still here, more or less. Maybe a few miles away in Opp or Enterprise or Brewton.

  Evan pulled into the driveway, holly branches scraping against the car as he parked by the side door. He got out and retucked his dress shirt: they always dressed for her parents as if they’d been at church that morning. Lucia was standing and straightening her belt when her mother pushed open the storm door, makeup fresh and hair well tended, bracelets and necklace coordinated, bare toes curled around the top step.

  “Was the traffic bad?” Caroline asked. Her first question always involved traffic.

  Lucia kissed her cheek.

  “Not bad at all,” she answered. Her mother smelled of Oil of Olay and White Rain hair spray, and Lucia inhaled.

  “Not a single log truck,” Evan said, which earned him a jab in his side from Caroline.

  Her mother’s obsession with log trucks had grated on Lucia for years—every time she got in a car, her mother issued some sort of log truck advisory. Lucia had long congratulated herself on muffling her annoyance, No, Mother, I was not behind any log trucks, and if there was condescension in her voice, it was surely justified because, really, how many deaths were caused by fallen logs each year? Then she brought Evan home to meet her parents, and eventually, after maybe the twentieth warning, he’d brushed a hand against Caroline’s elbow and said, “So tell me about this relationship between you and log trucks.”

  Her mother had laughed and, in that moment, log trucks had become a joke. Evan had a knack for filing off the edges. It was an unexpected benefit of marriage: when confronted by some small blight growing in the family crevices, her husband could smile and lop it off, send it flying through the air, inconsequential.

  The storm door closed behind them, the kitchen warm from the sun beating through the glass. Several empty serving dishes were lined up along the counter waiting to be filled, and the table was set.

  “I like your hair pulled back like that,” her mother said. “It’s burning up in here, isn’t it? I don’t think the air’s blowing right. I’ll open a window.”

  Lucia hung her purse over a kitchen chair. “It feels fine. You’re just hot from running around.”

  “Oliver!” her mother called. “They’re here!”

  “We’ll go say hello,” said Lucia.

  “Well, it’s not as if he’s going to come in here, is it?” said Caroline. She drifted toward the stove, lifting the lid from a pot of field peas, which Evan loved. Her curls—silver streaking the brown—did not shift as she stirred.

  Lucia nudged Evan, steering him down the dim hallway with a hand between his shoulder blades. As usual, he bumped into the phone shelf that jutted from the knotted-pine wall.

  Oliver Roberts was in his recliner. His white hair, still thick, swooped over his ears. Behind him, the mantel was decorated with two etched-glass hurricane lamps and a poodle made of sweetgum balls. The television thrummed with a stagecoach chase scene.

  “Here they are!” he boomed. “My two favorite lunch guests!”

  Lucia crossed over the rope rug, red as a blood clot. Her father flipped down the footrest, making as if he would stand, but as usual, she reached him before he made any progress. She hugged him, his cheek scraping hers pleasantly, and he shook Evan’s hand.

  “Still feeling good about Coach Dye and that wishbone offense?” Oliver asked.

  “I am,” Evan said. His voice was always heartier when he talked to her father.

  “He called us the University of Auburn,” huffed Oliver. “Doesn’t even know the name of his own college.”

  “That only happened once,” Evan said. “You called me Edward at least five times on my first visit. Cut him some slack.”

  Oliver laughed. “I thought I called you Edgar.”

  “That, too.”

  “Hey, I got a new joke,” Oliver said, arms stretching to the ceiling.

  “Let’s hear it,” Evan said.

  “It’s a little racist, but—”

  “No, Dad,” Lucia said.

  Next to her, Evan studied the carpet.

  “It’s not a bad one,” her father said. “There’s this black bus driver who makes the same stop every day—”

  “Dad,” Lucia said, and part of her wondered if she should just let him tell the joke. Because it hurt him. It actually hurt his feelings that she would not listen to him. “Come on.”

  “Lucia, it’s a joke. You know that. It doesn’t mean anything. Lord, the look on your face. You’re so serious.”

  Evan looked away from the floor. “I’m telling you, if Dye can work miracles in one season at Wyoming, he can do it for us.”

  “Did we watch the same game?” Oliver said, diverted. “Auburn against Wake Forest? The smallest school playing in a Power Five conference?”

  “He’s changing the whole system,” Evan said.

  “I think,” Lucia said, “that I’ll go see if Mother needs any help.”

  Evan dropped onto the sofa, legs sprawling, and he gave her a look that said: Once again you’re abandoning me while I stay here and talk football because we are manly men and the kitchen is not our domain, and how the hell did you ever come out of this house?

  Thank God he was an Auburn fan. A philosophy major, Ohio born, but the football redeemed him with her father. It opened the door to endless talk of post patterns and lob passes. Sitting across from her father, Evan never struggled with what to say next.

  She was jealous sometimes.

  She stepped back into the humid air of the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, pulling out the pitcher of tea and nudging aside the Hershey’s Syrup, which she could taste on her tongue just by looking at the can. Caroline was bending into the oven, pants slightly too tight, a bulge above her waistline. She would hate this view of herself.

  “Do you want me to slice some tomato?” Lucia asked.

  “That’d be nice,” Caroline said. “Celery, too. Make sure to string it good.”

  “I know,” said Lucia.

  “The Jell-O salad is on the middle shelf,” said Caroline. “And I need the Cool Whip.”

  Lucia pulled out the Jell-O—lemon, her favorite—and the Cool Whip.

  “Do you know,” said her mother, reaching for her silver mixing bowl, “that I’ve started adding almond extract? Can you imagine?”

  “To the Jell-O topping?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Caroline. She had the cream cheese softening on the counter, its silver skin split open. “A teaspoon.”

  Lucia cracked the oven, peering at the casserole and
the dish under it—surely dumplings—both golden and simmering. The bubbles churned against the Pyrex.

  “Do you remember Mavis Thorington at church?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Lucia, thinking, She’s dead. Whoever she is, she’s dead.

  “Her husband was Winston?” her mother prompted.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Massive heart attack. In her garage. Lucky she wasn’t driving.”

  Lucia slipped on an oven mitt and turned the chicken casserole. “Do you leave out the vanilla when you put in the almond? Or add both?”

  “I cut out the vanilla altogether,” Caroline said, smashing cream cheese with a fork. “‘Just a splash’ of almond, as Mama would say. You know she never measured anything.”

  “‘A splash and a dab and a shake,’” Lucia agreed. Her mother enjoyed sifting through the old familiar phrases, bringing her own mother back into the kitchen with them.

  “‘Stipple on some aloe,’” Caroline said.

  That was a verb Lucia loved. She’d never heard anyone use it but her grandmother, who until the very end had kept an aloe plant by the sink, snapping a leaf for every scald and blister.

  “Don’t get sentimental over the Jell-O,” she told her mother. “Granna didn’t even miss her leg. She’d be fine with you letting go of the vanilla.”

  “Lu-cia,” said Caroline, laughing soft and low. “How was Chicago?”

  “Good.”

  “You flew?”

  “I wouldn’t drive to Chicago, Mother.”

  “How was the flight?”

  This part of her life felt exotic to her mother, Lucia knew. Airplanes and hotels and taxis. She suspected that if she described each moment of the flight in detail—the stewardesses’ uniforms, the chicken salad, how the man next to her hogged the armrest—her mother would sit enthralled.

  “Same as usual,” she said, knowing she should give her mother the chatter that she so obviously wanted.

  “Did you order room service?” Caroline asked.

  “I don’t think so. No. We ate out.”

  “But you have, haven’t you?” Her mother gave her a sly look. “You’ve ordered room service before.”

  “I have,” Lucia said. She opened the oven door again, deciding the dumplings were ready. “Are these apple?”

  “Pear.”

  “Last week I did them with chocolate and raspberries.”

  “Chocolate?” Her mother reached for a wooden spoon without turning her head. She had a pink burn mark across her wrist, the seared imprint of the oven rack. “You went to school with Mavis’s nephew, actually.”

  “Tom,” Lucia said slowly. “Tom?”

  “Tom,” agreed Caroline. “That boy had a head full of mayonnaise. Remember when that baseball cap flew off his head when he was driving down the highway, and so he put the car in reverse and drove backward to get it?”

  “Yeah,” said Lucia, laughing. “And the station wagon—it was a station wagon, right?—ran into him. Or he ran into it. I remember.”

  There was a reason that they talked in the kitchen—dumplings and Jell-O salads filled the empty spaces. The past could do that, too. It was as if the two of them were standing far apart, separated by a huge bedsheet, a wide flat expanse. One old story would fold up the distance, bring them close, corner against corner.

  “Tomato,” her mother reminded.

  Lucia reached into the far-right drawer where the sharp knives stayed, and the lace curtains blew against her arm. Her mother had opened a window after all, and the familiarness of it washed over Lucia. She knew this place. She knew the cereal cabinet squeaked, making it dangerous to snitch Rice Krispies—which were kept not in a box but in a Tupperware cylinder—in the wee hours of the night. In the drawer under the toaster, you could find every possible variation of aluminum foil, Saran wrap, and sandwich bags. Bacon grease was collected in a Crisco tin by the sink. The view out every kitchen window was all leaves and branches. The curtains were tacky, but she loved how the hot air blew through the mesh screens and the green of the trees pulsed.

  Most of the time she could barely remember the girl who had lived in this house, but there were moments—lace fluttering, wind smelling of honeysuckle and bacon and Barbecue Lay’s—there were moments where she was right under Lucia’s skin.

  “I saw the piece in the paper,” her mother said. “I saved a copy.”

  “About the counseling center?”

  “The women who called had trouble with their husbands, I suppose? And you’d tell them if they should get a divorce?”

  “I’d tell them what options they had,” Lucia said. “If they wanted to leave, I’d tell them how to do it smartly. Like to take the children with them because judges don’t like it when the mother leaves the children behind. That kind of thing.”

  “Such a fuss,” her mother said.

  Lucia finished peeling the tomato, focused on the narrow margin between peel and flesh. Her mother had, more than once, bought a dress she disliked because she didn’t want to hurt the saleswoman’s feelings. Her mother, asked by a teenage Lucia if it bothered her that women weren’t allowed to speak in their church, had said I don’t really care for public speaking. When that church had splintered a few years ago over the question of whether to let black people join, her father—despite his taste in jokes—came down on the right side of the issue and her mother would barely speak to him for weeks. It’s not worth all the hurt feelings, she’d said. Everyone mad at each other. Such a fuss.

  “I spoke to one woman whose husband had broken her thumb,” Lucia said. “He bent it back until it snapped.”

  “Gracious,” Caroline said, but Lucia got the feeling that she did not entirely believe it had happened. In her world, breaking a woman’s bones was not a thing a man did, and if a man did do it, it reflected poorly on the woman for being with him in the first place. Really it was best not to think about it.

  Lucia slid the tomato neatly into the glass dish already two-thirds full of cucumber slices and chunks of Vidalia onion. She had seen this particular dish filled with these particular foods her entire life.

  “Moxie’s gone,” she said.

  “What?”

  It was a relief to allow the thoughts in her head to match the words coming from her mouth. “Evan came home two days ago and she was gone,” she said. “We’ve driven around the neighborhood for hours.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Caroline said cheerfully.

  Unless she was dead in the road somewhere, Lucia thought. Unless she was hurt and bleeding. The dog did not have good odds when it came to the survival of the fittest. As the days passed, Lucia was finding it harder to push back these sorts of thoughts.

  “Go on and tell the boys to come help their plates,” her mother said.

  Lucia retrieved the men. They led the way as they all sidestepped along the counter, plates in hand, dipping into Pyrex and Corningware. Eventually they settled into their usual places with Oliver and Evan at the head and foot of the kitchen table. Their chairs squeaked against the linoleum as they pulled them out.

  “I asked her about room service,” Caroline said, still standing. She reached for the tea pitcher and topped off her husband’s glass. Lucia had never seen her father pour her mother a glass of anything.

  “She’s ordered it, hasn’t she?” said her father.

  “I made him a bet, Lucia,” Caroline said.

  Evan unfolded his paper napkin. “You people know how to have fun.”

  “What’s the big deal about room service?” asked Lucia. “It’s a business expense.”

  Her parents laughed.

  “A business expense,” mimicked her father, not unkindly. Proudly even, as if she had suddenly spoken a sentence in French.

  Caroline sat, finally. She folded her hands.
>
  “Shall we pray, everyone?” Oliver said. “Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this food, this day, and all your many blessings—”

  You did it yourself, Lucia thought, behind her closed eyes.

  She knew that beneath their sunny affection, her parents felt that she had gone off to college and come back a stranger. It wasn’t true. In first grade, the teachers had laid out a box of multicolored reading sheets. You started at pink and worked your way to black. She got to black before anyone else was even past purple. Her parents had expected straight As, and she’d delivered. They told her she could do anything. She won trophies and ribbons and plaques.

  Did they expect that her wiring would short-circuit when she got her high school diploma, all the momentum leeched out of her? That she would step into the real world and want nothing more than to find a man and have children and scour the mall for pretty dresses and hand towels?

  They taught her to think and they taught her to want. She was exactly who they had made her to be.

  “Everything looks delicious, Mother,” she said, as she opened her eyes.

  II.

  Lucia peeled off the paper that was taped to her door, noticing that it was actually a receipt from Spencer’s Gifts. Call me at Molly’s, the note said, followed by Rachel’s signature and a phone number.

  The phone call did not take long. Lucia shouted down the hallway to Evan that Rachel had spotted Moxie and that she would be back in a minute with the dog. Then she was stepping out the not-quite-closed door, still in her striped dress and wedge sandals. Moxie. Filthy snout and big wet tongue and wiggling, crushing weight on your lap, and she had missed the dumb dog so much. She was pacing up and down the driveway when Rachel pulled up to the curb. She shifted into park a little too quickly, her feet hitting the pavement while the car was still rocking. She slammed the door, then yanked at the handle a couple of times before heading toward Lucia at a trot, pastel-flowered dress flapping.

  Lucia hugged her. “I’ve been so worried. Did she look all right? Did you talk to the people who have her?”

  They were already moving, turning onto the sidewalk.