Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  For once, she would be thrilled for the conversation to stay on football.

  “Y’all want a glass of tea?” Lucia asked.

  Her parents both shook their heads. Caroline stepped up to the kitchen counter, straightening the pile of mail. Oliver reached into his back pocket slowly, and Lucia somehow knew by just the motion of his arm that he’d brought a gun. He laid it flat in his palm and held it out to her.

  “I want you to take this,” he said.

  Evan was already shaking his head, but Oliver kept his eyes on Lucia. His hand was steady, and the gun was dark and polished. Attractive, even, if you thought of it as a sculpture.

  “It’s just a little twenty-two pistol,” her dad said. “Good for a woman. Not too heavy. Not much recoil. It only holds six rounds, but it’d still be my choice. You can keep it in your purse. Go on. Just hold it and see how it feels.”

  “Is it—”

  “You think I’d hand you a loaded gun?” he said. “Didn’t I teach you anything? I’ve got the magazine in my other pocket.”

  She took it from his hand. The metal was cool and smooth, light in her palm. Her father had taken her target shooting when she was younger, wooden circles hammered into trees, squirrels jumping through branches. She’d never particularly liked the idea of guns. This one, though, felt comfortable.

  “Why do I need a lady gun?” she said.

  She was playing her part now, and as she expected, her father snorted slightly. She expected Evan to laugh, but he didn’t.

  “I’ve been warning you,” Oliver said, as he double-checked the deadbolt on the door.

  Lucia shook her head. “Please don’t—”

  “This is what happens when the blacks move in,” he said.

  She set the gun on the counter, turning it so that the barrel pointed toward the wall. “Black people are not the issue. The neighborhood is perfectly safe.”

  “It’s not their fault—I’m not saying that,” said Oliver. “It’s the way it is. Violence follows them, even the good ones. They bring it with them. You look at Martin Luther King and what happened everywhere he went. You can’t deny that’s the truth.”

  Lucia stood at the spot where the kitchen linoleum gave way to den carpet. She kicked at a scrap of gnawed rawhide and, across the room, Moxie lunged to her feet.

  “I can deny it,” she said.

  “Honey,” said her mother. No more than that. It was not clear who she was chastising, but Lucia’s father pivoted, rubbing his hands together hard enough that it seemed possible he would start a fire.

  Lucia watched him pace around her kitchen. She could picture him when he was dark haired and lean, driving her down country highways with cookie crumbs all over the front seat. He’d taken her past old sharecropper shacks, planks of wood barely stuck together. He’d pointed to two black children playing on a splintered porch, and he’d told her, Maybe you’ll pass one of those kids on the street one day, and maybe they won’t talk like you do or act like you do. You remember this. You don’t ever know what people come home to. She’d watched through that same car window as he changed a cavalcade of flat tires: he was incapable of driving past any woman, black or white, stranded on the side of the road. He’d taught her to stop and help strangers.

  He’d taught her that Mexicans would cheat you if they could. He’d taught her that a husband was the head of his wife just as Christ was the head of the church. And so what was she supposed to do with all of it, looking at him now scanning her cabinets for some loose knob he could tighten?

  “It has nothing to do with the neighborhood, Oliver,” said Evan, falling onto the sofa. “It wasn’t random. Tell him who you think it was, Lucia.”

  “I have no idea,” she said, puzzled. “It could have been random.”

  “Really?” Evan said. “No idea at all?”

  She understood then. He was desperate enough that he was willing to bring her parents into this. She had refused to hypothesize, and now he was hoping to have numbers on his side.

  “Really,” she said. “I have no idea.”

  She did not really believe that the shooting was random, but why burden her parents with that detail? She’d tried to convince Evan: there was no solving this. So many names and so many faces. These past few nights, lying awake, she’d assessed every person she’d encountered in the past week. The past month. Surely she averaged a dozen new people a week, and that was if she hadn’t done any public speaking. If she stretched back further through the years, back to the would-he-kill-me? days, she might have met hundreds a month. Those names and faces were gone, most of them, wiped clean from her mind.

  But she didn’t have to delve that far back. Divorce drove people crazy. When your family fell apart, it stripped you down to your most primal self, which was why divorce lawyers tended to get assaulted more than, say, estate attorneys or intellectual property guys. How many people might hate her? Maybe none. Maybe a thousand. There was no keeping track. If she tried—if she pictured a maniac behind every face she passed on the sidewalk or smiled at from behind her desk—she’d never make it through the day.

  “You think you know the person?” her father asked her. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him. He propped an elbow on the counter, nearly mirroring her mother’s pose.

  “Won’t y’all please sit down?” Lucia said to them both.

  “We’re fine,” said Caroline. “Do you? Do you think you know whoever did it?”

  Lucia stepped backward until she felt the wall. She pushed against it, easing the ache in her shoulders.

  “There’s no telling,” she said. “It could be anyone I’ve ever met over the past decade or more or it could be someone I’ve never met. It’s pointless to start going down that road. The police will see what they can find out. That’s their job.”

  “What about that fellow who ran the bulldozer into his wife’s bedroom?” her father asked.

  That case had been in the papers. The photos had been compelling.

  “It wasn’t a bulldozer,” Lucia said. “It was a backhoe. And the wife’s sister had some internal injuries, so he got sentenced to five years. It’s not him.”

  Her father rested his chin on his hand. She could feel him warming to the topic. Her mother was scraping away with one fingernail at something on the countertop.

  “You’ve had nut jobs,” Oliver said. “You don’t talk about them, but we know you’ve had nut jobs.”

  Lucia was not, legally speaking, allowed to talk about the nut jobs. She’d never mentioned the man whose wife had found him tied up with extension cords, with their real estate agent naked on top of him, rubbing his chest with a Brillo pad. She hadn’t told them about the woman who emptied her children’s college savings account. She hadn’t told them about the man who executed his son’s gerbil or the grandmother who set her daughter-in-law’s car on fire. All of those stories involved their own ugliness, but it was assessable. It was contained inside a single house and limited to a couple of people, maybe a handful, if you counted children and grandmothers and real estate agents. In court, there could be a reckoning, and she could be part of it.

  Some things did not have a reckoning, and waiting for one would drive you crazy.

  “What about the black man who killed that woman at Sears?” her mother said.

  “That man’s in prison, Mother,” Lucia answered. “When you kill people, you wind up in prison. Can we please stop doing this?”

  “You’ve overdone yourself,” Caroline said. “You’ve just overdone yourself.”

  Lucia watched as her mother toed off her shoes, nudging them against the wall, toe to toe and heel to heel. She needed things in their appropriate place. Shoes and dishes and cereal in Tupperware and men and women and black and white, and she believed that if you never veered outside the lines, nothing bad could happen to you. Like a lasso laid on the ground, warding off
the snakes. And if something terrible did happen, that surely meant you had stepped over a line.

  Lucia picked up the gun, letting it rest in her hand. Hollywood made up that story about lassos. Westerns were full of nonsense. Snakes could go anywhere they wanted.

  “Thank you, Dad,” she said. “I’m not sure I want this, but—”

  “Why wouldn’t you want it?” asked her father.

  “I don’t know. A gun in the house? A gun in my purse?”

  “I have one,” said her mother. “There’s no harm in being safe.”

  “You have a gun?” Lucia asked, and she could not have been more surprised if her mother had announced that she had voted for Jimmy Carter.

  “Of course I do,” said her mother. “In the bedroom closet. Although if I’m driving by myself, I keep it under the seat just in case.”

  “Is it in case of a log truck problem?” asked Evan.

  It was well-timed. Lucia smiled along with the rest of them, but she was thinking of when she was a teenager, already cringing at her mother’s talk of well-folded napkins and no chewing gum in church. She’d pulled into the driveway and felt a thump under her back tire. When she got out, she saw the squirrel, its back broken. Bloody and skull-mangled, dragging itself away from the car.

  She had screamed like some bimbo in Friday the 13th, and she’d run to get her mother. Caroline had marched to the lawn-tools rack in the garage and then, as Lucia had covered her eyes, she’d bashed the squirrel over the head with the shovel, and Lucia had felt like she was watching a stranger.

  “A woman alone,” Caroline said. “Things can happen.”

  “What things could happen, Mother?” pushed Lucia, out of habit.

  “A maniac could shoot through your window, for one thing.”

  “And you’d shoot back?” Lucia said. “And kill him in a hail of bullets with your sharpshooting skills?”

  Her father opened his mouth, making the slightest breath of a sound, but her mother laid a hand on his arm.

  “If you’re working late in your office and a man is coming toward you,” Caroline said, “don’t you think pulling out a gun would make him pause?”

  Lucia considered her mother, standing there with her immovable hair and her bare feet.

  “It will make you feel safer,” her mother said.

  “But will she actually be safer?” asked Evan.

  “Than if she had no defense at all?” Oliver said. “Yes.”

  Lucia looked from her parents to her husband and back again. They’d arranged themselves on opposite sides of the room, so the only way to carry on this conversation was to twist and turn.

  “I have mace,” she said. “I keep—”

  “I got it for her years ago,” Evan interrupted.

  “Why are you two still standing up?” Lucia said. “Would you please go sit down?”

  Oliver at least stepped from behind the counter, venturing onto the carpet. “I know you think you’re the same as a man, Lucia,” he said. “I’m not even disagreeing with you. Fine. But even a man—”

  Lucia lifted a foot and brought it down hard, aware that the movement was perilously close to a stomp. It was easy to slip into old patterns with her parents, but they had their own patterns and they were still standing up instead of sitting on the sofa like reasonable people and everyone was talking too much.

  “Dad, I don’t think I’m the same as a man,” she said. “Okay? You know why? Because Arnold Dobson, the jackass, does not walk into a courtroom thinking, oh, since I’m a man, I need to make sure that what I do reflects well on any men who might come after me. If I make a mistake, it hurts all men everywhere. No, Arnold Dobson walks into a courtroom thinking ‘I’m Arnold Dobson. I’ll do whatever the hell I want and it will be brilliant.’”

  Her father walked to the sofa. He backed up until his legs hit the cushions, but he did not sit.

  “Who’s Arnold Dobson?” he asked.

  “A man,” said her mother. “A lawyer.”

  Lucia ran a hand over her face. They were only trying to help, and she knew that. She looked back at the gun, dark metal on the white Formica. The truth was that she had liked the weight of it, and as she stared at it, her hands felt empty. She thought of bloody squirrels and shovels.

  “All right,” she said.

  “What?” said Evan, standing. Now everyone in the whole damn place was standing.

  “I want it,” Lucia said.

  “You’re not taking the gun?” Evan said, somewhere between a statement and a question.

  She suspected that the look on his face was the same one she had worn when her mother announced she kept a gun in the car.

  “They have a point,” she said.

  “Good girl,” her father said.

  “I’ll certainly feel better,” said her mother. “If that matters to you.”

  A flash of red streaked past the glass doors. A cardinal, which Moxie would probably try to eat.

  “Everyone can feel better,” Lucia said.

  The cardinal circled back, winging past the wind chimes.

  Soon her parents left, happy.

  She was left with Evan, unhappy.

  She locked the door behind her parents and turned back to the gun, still biding its time on the counter. She needed a place for it. Obviously, the bedroom made the most sense—the bedside drawer would be closer, but the top shelf of the closet would be safer.

  She could feel Evan watching her.

  “It makes sense,” she told him, moving his keys from the counter to the wicker basket. He always forgot and tossed them on the counter. “You’re the one who wants me to do something. Now I’ve done something. So tell me again why you’re angry?”

  “I don’t have a particular problem with the gun,” he said.

  She waited for him to finish, and when he didn’t, she turned to face him. He stood still until she came closer, both of them in the middle of the den, an empty patch of carpet between them.

  “I have a problem,” he said, “with you pretending that the gun solves anything. You can’t just carry a gun around and assume that if someone shoots at you, you can shoot back. You can’t let this into our lives every day and every minute.”

  She agreed with him completely.

  “Evan,” she said, “I could get killed every time I walk from this house to my car. You think I don’t know that? You think I’m ignoring it? Every time I walk from the parking lot to my office. Every time I walk past a window. Every time I go to the grocery store. What do you expect me to do? Shut myself in the house? Hire bodyguards, who, by the way, wouldn’t be able to stop a bullet? At some point you have to accept that there is risk and that you cannot eradicate it. I am getting up in the morning and going through my day, and I’m doing everything in my power not to let this into our lives.”

  He took several breaths before he spoke.

  “You’re going through your day? So the past two mornings when you went to work, you just walked to your car, pulled out of the driveway, not worried at all?”

  “As much as possible,” she said.

  “Well, I think about it,” he said. “I think about it plenty. Did you even notice that I was at the door on Thursday and Friday, watching you pull out? Trying to look for some man hiding with a gun, hoping that if you did get shot, I could at least get to you quickly. I’m beginning to think that I might do that every morning forever. Wait for bullets. Wait for a phone call from the hospital.”

  He lifted his hands, flexing them in the air, like he was going to catch something that never came. He turned his face away from her.

  Moxie finally spotted the cardinal and threw herself at the glass door, leaving a swathe of drool. She barked, insistent, and the cardinal twitched. Lucia laid a hand on the dog, buying a few seconds of quiet. The barking and the wind chimes and Evan would
start again any second.

  “I worry about you,” Lucia said. “Of course, I worry about you.”

  “Me?”

  “You or Rachel could have been hurt just as easily as me. It’s not like it was a precise sort of attack. But, Evan—there’s no point to it. There’s no end to it. If we start—”

  Moxie growled, low in her throat. Evan thumped on the glass, scaring away the bird.

  “You know very well that there are steps we could take,” he said to the patio. “But you don’t want to discuss them. Here’s the thing: you don’t get to out-argue me. This isn’t court. There’s no winning. No one wins if we’re both miserable, and you know that better than me.”

  IV.

  Lucia pulled into Rachel’s driveway, stopping just past the sidewalk. The front curtains were drawn, and she couldn’t see any lights, but both cars were parked in the garage. Her watch confirmed that it wasn’t quite 6:00 p.m., so unless Rachel and her mother ate early—which seemed unlikely given Rachel’s leisurely evening visits—she wouldn’t be interrupting supper. She wouldn’t have been forced to stop by unexpectedly if only someone would have answered the phone. She’d called half a dozen times since Rachel had left her house, and no one ever picked up. Weren’t they ever home?

  Well, they were home now.

  She walked up the cobblestones toward the front door, the rosebushes snagging her skirt. Ivy clung to the stonework, and she had to nudge the leaves aside to ring the doorbell. As she waited, she pulled a soggy advertisement for lawn service from the storm door. She was reaching for the doorbell again when the doorknob turned. The door made an unsettling sucking sound as it swung partially open. As Lucia was wondering whether anyone ever used this entrance, Margaret stepped into view, a ring of keys in her hand. She kept hold of the door, blocking the view of the room behind her.

  “Hello, Lucia,” she said.

  She did not offer any invitations.

  “Margaret,” Lucia said, “I’m sorry to bother you. But I was wondering about Rachel. I wanted to make sure she was all right. I’ve called—”

  “When?”