Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  “She looked fine,” said Rachel. “Her normal self. But the guy was calling her Chewie. Isn’t that strange? She still has her red collar and tag around her neck, so why hasn’t he called you?”

  Lucia stopped. With a little prompting, she got a more thorough account of what Rachel had seen and heard, and her relief shifted into something darker. Had the man stolen Moxie right out of the yard?

  “I don’t think you should come with me,” she said.

  “I have to show you the house.” Rachel headed off at full speed, as if she could outrun an argument.

  Maybe she could, because Lucia fell into step. Her anger was overpowering anything else. He had stolen her dog. A dog as trusting as any animal could be, not an iota of self-preservation in her. If this fool of a man thought that she wouldn’t rip him apart to get Moxie back, he was mistaken.

  She crushed a pinecone underfoot.

  “We take a right up here,” Rachel said. “It’s on that street.”

  “Thomas Street.”

  “I guess,” said Rachel. “Hey, I saw that story about you in the paper.”

  Lucia looked over. The girl was a fast walker, thank goodness, not a stroller. And did everyone in the entire city read the Alabama Journal?

  “They think you’re a ‘pretty little blonde,’” Rachel added. She seemed to believe the phrasing was flattering.

  “That is what they wrote,” Lucia said.

  “And you’re a feminist.”

  “I am.”

  “Why,” said Rachel, “would you kidnap a dog that lives a couple of blocks away?”

  Lucia abandoned thoughts of discussing women’s equality.

  “Because you’re not that bright,” she said, but that was likely not the whole of it. She thought back to her vandalized car years ago, and she thought of the occasional nastiness she got in the mail. It was possible that she had represented this man’s wife or ex-wife, or maybe she had refused to represent him. It was possible that he was a nutcase who believed women should be obedient and homebound. It was possible that this was some elaborate attempt to meet her. Pretty little blonde. This option would not have occurred to her before Judge Musgrove told her—in open court a few years back—that he would have dismissed any case just for the opportunity to sit and watch her sweet ass walk out the door. Before Garrison Langley had admitted that he’d offered her that short-lived partnership because he’d hoped that she’d sleep with him. Amenable, he’d said. I hoped you’d be amenable. He’d had a couple of martinis, but no question he was telling the truth.

  Sometimes she wondered at her sex appeal. Maybe it was the strangeness of her—a woman lawyer—that drew them in. Like a woman with three breasts. Bizarre but intriguing.

  If this man had stolen her dog hoping to sleep with her, it was a stupider plan than offering her a partnership.

  When they pulled even with the chain-link fence, Rachel pointed to where she’d seen Moxie, but there was no sign of the dog. They turned the corner to the front of the house, and the yard was all shadows and dirt. The roots of a huge pecan tree spread out in winding spokes, and thick branches rubbed against the roof, creaking against the rain gutters.

  As they walked up the front steps, Lucia again had a pang of uncertainty about bringing the girl with her. She knocked three times, angling herself more squarely in front of Rachel.

  The man who answered was about her height, maybe in his fifties, with silver hair and an untrimmed beard. He wore a T-shirt airbrushed with a sunset. She recognized him: she’d seen him walking his beagles past her house.

  “Hey there,” he said, smiling.

  She did not smile back.

  “I’m Lucia Gilbert,” she said. “I live on Avalon, and I believe you have my dog.”

  The man rubbed a hand across his beard. “Do I?”

  “I think you do,” she said. “My friend saw her in your backyard. An Airedale. With a name tag that says Moxie.”

  She kept her eyes on him, ready for him to push back at her.

  “All right,” he said, even keeled. As if she’d asked for a drink from the garden hose. “You want to go see her? She’s in the back room.”

  In a few steps, the three of them were standing in a laundry room, the smell of dryer sheets filling the air, Moxie bouncing in her four-footed fashion, beagles running in circles around her, yipping. She reared up, paws landing on Lucia’s shoulders, which was always forbidden, but now Lucia let the sharp claws sink into her collarbones.

  “Moxie,” she said. “Sweet girl. Such a sweet girl. Did you miss me? Oh, don’t lick up my nostril.”

  “All right,” said the man, standing behind her. “I’m Marlon Reynolds. Did I say that already? That’s a good dog you’ve got there.”

  Lucia elbowed Moxie gently until she thudded back to the tile floor.

  “Didn’t you recognize her?” she asked. “Surely you’d seen her in my yard.”

  The man shrugged. He looked, she thought, like one of the Oak Ridge Boys. “I saw a dog walking down the street. I didn’t want her to get hit by a car. I took her in and fed her and made sure she was safe.”

  “My phone number is right there on her tag.”

  “Is it?”

  Lucia couldn’t read his tone, which was no tone at all. She slid her fingers around Rachel’s wrist, pulling her from the laundry room. Moxie followed, pressing close and drooling. When they were out of the small room with an open path to the front door, Lucia turned back to Marlon Reynolds.

  “I thank you for taking care of her,” she said. “But you didn’t call me. You didn’t make any attempt to contact me. It looks more like theft than a rescue.”

  “You think I stole her?” he asked in that same calm way.

  “Yes,” she said, taking a step closer. He took a step back. “You took a dog that did not belong to you. That’s the definition of stealing. You—”

  “I found her,” he repeated. “Her mouth was all mud. You might check your backyard. My guess is she dug under the fence.”

  “The mud doesn’t mean she dug a hole,” she snapped. “She just likes the taste of dirt. And why didn’t you contact me once you found her? If she goes missing again, I’ll let the police know about this. I want you to stay away from my dog. Do you understand?”

  He took another step backward.

  “I do,” he said, giving a two-fingered salute. “As subtle as you’re being, I think I got the message.”

  “All right then,” she said.

  She turned and walked toward the front door without looking back, steering Rachel in front of her. For once, Moxie actually heeled. With one yank of the doorknob, they were all spilling back into the shaded yard. Overhead, the branches still clawed at the eaves of the house. The whole visit hadn’t taken more than five minutes.

  “Come on,” said Lucia. “Let’s get a little distance from Marlon, why don’t we? Come, Moxie. Come, Moxie. Come.”

  The heeling had been short-lived. She tugged at the dog’s collar, wishing she’d thought to bring a leash. Usually if you could start her momentum, she would follow.

  “You don’t mind it, do you?” Rachel asked.

  “What?”

  “Fighting. Having someone angry at you. It makes me sick to my stomach when someone is mad at me.”

  The girl looked more exhilarated than anxious. She ran a hand over Moxie’s back, then veered onto a shaded lawn, taking a short leap into a half-raked pile of leaves. She landed with both feet, bits of leaves flying around her, swirling.

  Adrenaline—Lucia felt it, too.

  The wind was already full of things. White camellia petals blew around their ankles, skimming along the sidewalk then out into the street. Petals and leaves, a piece of plastic bag, an insect wing. A ladybug landed on Lucia’s throat and then ricocheted away.

  “A therapist once told me
that I use the conflict in my work to fill my need for conflict,” Lucia said.

  Rachel roped her tangled hair over her shoulder. Her dress was flecked with pieces of leaf. And some sort of red stain. “You have a therapist?”

  “I tried it once.”

  Rachel brushed at the leaves. “You have a need for conflict?”

  “I think her point was that we all have a need for conflict.”

  “I don’t,” Rachel said.

  Lucia rolled her shoulders, which were starting to ache from her hunchbacked position. Her fingers were deep in fur.

  “It was like a Jedi mind trick,” Rachel said, her words speeding up. “Like he was powerless to resist you. You know, back when I first met you, Mom said you were the first lawyer she called because people are scared of you.”

  “People say that. Among other things.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt your feelings?”

  “Yes,” said Lucia.

  Two squirrels ran across the street, twisting up a pine tree, chattering and ecstatic. Lucia barely held on to Moxie as she lunged.

  “I suppose it doesn’t hurt my feelings that much,” she admitted. “I’ve known lawyers who hated a fight, and the stress melted them down eventually. I accept the need for conflict. You have to decide what you’ll let in, and you keep the rest out. Sometimes, you know, kindness isn’t effective. And when that happens, I can play whatever role is needed.”

  III.

  A few weeks after she’d retrieved Moxie, Lucia was checking the mail when she saw Marlon walking up her driveway. The beagles were at his feet, silent and perfectly in sync. She wondered how he managed it.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  He wore denim shorts and a faded T-shirt with enough holes that she thought moths might have been involved. He held a banana, half eaten, in the hand that wasn’t filled with dog leashes.

  “I’d wanted to say something to you,” he said. “First of all, I’m sorry.”

  “For taking my dog?”

  “Well, now, I didn’t take her. She was out already, and I let her in. But I did keep her. I admit that. You’re not around much, you know? She barks. She barks all day long, and I can hear her from the sidewalk.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Lucia.

  He took a bite of the banana. The beagles stood there.

  “I thought I’d take her in,” he said. “I thought maybe it would give you an easy out. Some people don’t really want their dog. I didn’t know if you’d come looking. I only wanted to make sure you were good to her.”

  Lucia nodded, wondering. Was she good to Moxie? Was it wrong to leave a dog at home for nine or ten hours by herself? She felt a rush of guilt, but she’d learned that guilt came too quickly: it needed parsing. Why should only her long hours matter? Evan was gone, too. And wasn’t solitude the lot of most dogs? When she was growing up, hadn’t she left Barnie—round black face, moplike body—for the entire school day? Her mother had been there in the house, but her mother hardly spoke to Barnie. Did it count so much just to have a human moving through the rooms, banging pots and pans occasionally?

  “Anyway, I apologize,” Marlon said. “I know you love your dog.”

  Lucia wished that she did not feel a rush of pleasure at that. She wished she didn’t care what anyone thought of her or her dog. She watched as Marlon folded up his banana peel, one handed, and tucked it into his pocket.

  “So you’re a lawyer, I hear?”

  “I am,” she said.

  He rolled a small black shape—some part of the banana stem?—between his fingertips.

  “How come?” he asked.

  “I had a roommate who was going to medical school,” she said, wondering how long the beagles could stay frozen. “We were competitive.”

  It was the truest answer she had. It did not make for a satisfying narrative arc, but it was accurate. She’d coordinated her law school interview with her roommate’s visit to Vanderbilt, and then she’d sat across from the dean of the law school and he thanked her for coming and asked her why she was worth taking a slot away from a man. Her fingers had gone slightly numb as she yammered out an answer, unsure how to justify herself. It was the first time she understood that her gender needed to be offset. Neutralized. Later she wondered if the question was supposed to test her ability to argue persuasively while stunned and hurt, but if so, surely she would have heard of men being asked some similarly insulting question. Although what could they be asked that would compare? At any rate, when she visited Cumberland Law School, the dean didn’t ask her that. He looked at her LSAT scores, and he told her if she’d come there, she’d be the queen of the law school. She made her decision before she even climbed back into her dinged-up Cutlass.

  When she started classes, she had to look up the definition of “plaintiff” and “defendant.”

  Marlon kept rubbing the banana remnant between his fingers. “You like divorce cases, I guess?”

  “I seem to be good at them,” she said.

  She did not especially like divorce cases. Back in those first years, if someone handed you a case, you didn’t ask what kind it was. Torts, contracts, civil liberties, a little bit of criminal—she had done them all, and this was where she had ended up. She had taken a series of steps, each one logical, and they had taken her to family law, without her ever aiming for it. The truth was that when she thought of what she loved about law, she thought of sitting in the White Tortoise, that old head shop downtown, the walls full of bongs. She’d been on retainer with the ACLU, and they wanted to challenge the state’s new paraphernalia law.

  She’d reached out to a dozen law enforcement agents, telling them that they were invited to their first-ever deposition in a head shop. Once they got there, she sat them down at one long table, where she’d spread her props: a bong, a glass pipe, a Coke can, an empty toilet paper roll, a razor blade, a mirror, that plastic spoon from McDonald’s that was good for cocaine snorting. A few other bits and pieces.

  She’d neatly labeled each item, and then she’d gone through the list with each deputy, one by one. Is this paraphernalia? And this? Out of those ten deputies, not two of them had the same answers. She knew before she left the shop that the law would be overturned. She could almost hear a clicking, like the turning of a Rubik’s Cube, bright squares sliding into place. That was what it felt like when you found the answer—where there’d been a jumble of colors, you started to see a pattern. You began shifting the pieces into place. That was what she loved: the moment three or four moves before the case was won—the moment when she saw it coming.

  “Do you hire detectives?” Marlon asked.

  “No,” she said. “I do not.”

  “Because this is the second thing I wanted to say. There’s a car that comes by your house.”

  That struck Lucia as funny. “Why are you casing my house, Marlon?”

  “I’m dead serious,” he said. “When I’m out with the dogs, I see a Black Buick pull up and sit there. I’ve seen it three or four times over the last week.”

  Lucia stepped sideways, poking at the hostas planted under the front window. The leaves were flattened, and she wondered if Evan had accidentally stood on them when he mowed the yard.

  “Rachel drives an old Buick,” she said.

  “It’s not the girl,” he said.

  Lucia wondered how many times a day Marlon walked his dogs, and she wondered how many of those times took him past her house.

  “Who else would it be?” she asked.

  “That’s my point.”

  She was not positive that this man was completely sane, but she was starting to like him. Her mother might do the same thing: construct private eyes or hit men out of lost deliverymen.

  “Well, Marlon,” she said, “if they want me, I imagine they’ll come to the door.”

  IV.

  Satur
day afternoon, her hand on the hard line of his jaw, bone and skin and bristle. His knees clamping her hip bones as she leaned forward, her hair falling around his face. Juicy Fruit on his breath. His hands on her waist, fingertips biting, as he flipped her to her back.

  The flat of his tongue on her collarbone. His sweat dripping onto her throat.

  Moxie, barking from the hallway, furious, as if mujahideen were storming the house, gory death imminent.

  “She’s been hallucinating strangers at the front door,” Evan said, pausing above her. “She’s determined someone is out there.”

  Her hands sliding over his shoulder blades. “More,” she said.

  He moved against her. His teeth clamped onto her upper arm, fastening only for a moment.

  Her hands in his damp hair.

  “Anytime,” he said.

  V.

  As she did every morning when she got to the office, Lucia picked up the mail from the basket where Marissa weeded and sorted it. Her various reflections went through the same motions along the lobby walls. She carried the stack down the hallway, bumping her office door open with her hip.

  At her desk, she ran a finger under the flap of the envelope with the Jackson & Price return address, fairly sure it was Paul Price trying to set up a meeting about the Woodruffs. She scanned it—As you likely know, my client and yours recently discussed the details of their divorce. If you’d like to meet . . .

  The next letter was a request to cohost a fund-raiser for George McMillan, which she would obviously do because she liked the man and also, Lord, if George Wallace won the governor’s nomination—it didn’t bear considering. She opened the third envelope. The lack of a return address should have made her cautious, but it had been months since she’d had one of these. Dear Lucia Gilbert, it started quite professionally. I hope one day you understand the damage you’ve done, how you ruin things and people. You reap what you sow, that’s the truth. I look forward to you rotting in hell sooner not later. Even if you get on your knees and pray and I bet that’s not what you do on your knees, you will burn and scream and you’ll deserve it.