Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  Lucia slid down farther in her seat, watching. Watson recoiled again. Paula shifted, her rickety lawn chair squeaking: the plastic bands of the seat were frayed, dipping under her weight. Lucia hoped it held. The martins were in the trees, chattering, and the Chapmans next door were outside. The parents stood by the grill, dickering over some charcoal issue, while the two high school girls batted a volleyball back and forth without a net.

  “Sharks can have fifteen rows of teeth,” said Watson. “They lose teeth every week.”

  “He has a book,” Paula said. “Where’s Evan? How long does it take to give the dog some food?”

  “He probably misplaced his glasses,” Lucia said. “Or his glass of water. Those are the big two.”

  “Remoras suck onto sharks like hitchhikers,” Watson said.

  The lavender blooms on the Japanese tulip tree were like cupped hands raised to the sky. Elegant geometries. Evan once told her that tulip trees were actually a type of magnolia. That had been back when this house was bare except for cardboard boxes and Hefty bags, and she’d been standing on this same patch of grass swigging ice water from a coffee cup because the glasses weren’t unpacked yet. She hadn’t believed him at first. She was well-acquainted with magnolias—genteel, her mother called them. Don’t they just make you picture those beautiful old plantations? Lucia had grown up loving the density of their branches: they were good climbing trees. Now she looked at the tree in front of her and remembered Evan’s pronouncement. Sometimes your idea of a thing did not match the reality of it. That could be a welcome surprise or not so welcome. At any rate, there was nothing genteel about this magnolia. It was exotic. Unexpected.

  The most beautiful tree she had ever seen happened to be in her own yard.

  The sun and the breeze and Watson’s ramblings were lovely, too. The azaleas were exploding in pinks and reds all along the back fence. She waved at the girls next door, who had come close, chasing their ball. They waved back, but then they spotted Watson and waved much more enthusiastically. He noticed.

  “Why are those girls looking at me?” he asked loudly. It made the girls double their efforts.

  “What girls?” asked Paula, turning, nearly tipping over her ancient chair. “Oh. Hey there!”

  “They think you’re cute,” Lucia said.

  “I am cute,” Watson said.

  Paula laughed, but Lucia didn’t. She looked at his wide feet and his smooth curved cheeks—everything on him soft and round, perfectly designed to elicit affection. He knew that he was smart and good and loved, and that was not as common as she once thought it was.

  She wished that she could shake the feeling that Evan had an agenda. That he had wanted to bring the child here to sway her.

  “Maybe Evan’s started getting the food together,” she said. “I’ll go check.”

  She unstuck her thighs from her chair and headed inside, making sure to close the sliding door behind her. The warm weather brought gnats. She heard cabinets opening and closing, and she knew she had been right.

  “You think we’re ready to eat?” she called.

  “I thought I’d set out the cheese and crackers,” Evan said.

  She rounded the corner into the kitchen, and he was at the sink, washing off a cheese knife. “If we’re doing that,” she said, “we might as well do all of it. I’ve got the fruit in the fridge.”

  He wiped the knife with a hand towel. She didn’t point out that the dish towel was hanging on the oven door.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “If you’ll tell me where stuff is, I can do it.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  She opened the refrigerator, pulling out the right bits and pieces of Tupperware.

  “Can you believe he knows the word ‘ophthalmoscope’?”

  “I know,” Lucia said.

  “He’s getting to the fun stage,” Evan said. “Where he’s not just a blob anymore. I don’t like them as blobs as much as when they turn into actual people.”

  Lucia dropped bread into the toaster: she’d cut it into triangles to go with the shrimp spread. She spotted the tomatoes still crammed in their wooden basket—she would slice them. She had onions, too, and maybe a cucumber.

  “Why did you ask them over?” she asked.

  Evan had his back to her, reaching for a platter on one of the higher shelves. “What do you mean?” he said. “We haven’t seen them in weeks.”

  “It feels like you’re trying to—” She had gotten this far, and she was committed now. “Sell me. It feels like you’re trying to sell me.”

  “Sell you on what?”

  “Watson.”

  He pulled out the Desert Rose plates one at a time, slower than necessary. She heard each one clink as it joined the stack.

  “It feels like you’re trying to convince me,” she said. “Like you’re hoping—you’re hoping—”

  He finally turned toward her, and she realized she had misread him. He was not ignoring her. He was not trying to draw her out more by keeping quiet. He was furious.

  “Like I’m hoping you’ll tie on an apron and stay home and have babies?” he said. “You think I invited our nephew over here as some sort of ploy?”

  “Are you telling me it didn’t cross your mind?”

  The toast sprang up, and Evan reached for it, tossing both pieces onto an empty plate. He blew on his fingers.

  “It’s like you’re looking for a reason to be mad at me, Lucia,” he said. “Like you’re mad at me before I say a word.”

  He was not wrong about the anger. She knew that.

  She had agreed to put the house up for sale. She had agreed to it even though there had been neither hide nor hair of the shooter. For all she knew, the psychopath had put a bullet in his own head as soon as he left their house. Regardless, if he had planned to follow up, surely he would have done so by now. And yet she had agreed that if a reasonable offer came in, she and Evan would relocate to some unknown destination, their names and number unlisted. If it happened once, it could happen again, Evan had said. You’re making it way too easy for someone to find you. She had agreed to it—to all that needless effort and thought and expense—and yet she could still feel her husband holding himself back. Or maybe she was the one holding herself back. Sometimes it was impossible to tell.

  “I feel the same way sometimes,” she said.

  “Like I’m looking for a reason to be mad?” he said. “I don’t have to look. I have a reason. I want to keep you alive. And you seem less interested in that than I do. You’re just—pretending.”

  She grabbed for a paper towel. Since they met, he had been the other half of her just like the movies promised. With other men, there’d been a part of her tucked away, watching, but Evan had reached every part of her and they had melted into a new thing.

  Lately she had felt herself reforming again, separate.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “What else do you want, I mean?”

  “You know,” he said.

  “You asked me to think about it,” she said. “I’m thinking about it.”

  “You’re not really thinking about it.”

  “I don’t want to join another practice,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to a bigger firm. I made my practice from scratch. It’s mine. It took years, and you know all that.”

  “I don’t know why it’s such a huge difference if you join another firm. You’d be more secure in one of the buildings downtown with a front desk and a security guard. You’d still keep your own cases. You’ve had enough offers. You could go in as a partner.”

  “Like Garrison Langley offered to—”

  “Don’t do that.” He dropped an elbow to the counter, and the toaster rattled behind him. “You’re good at what you do. You know damn well that Garrison is the only one who ever offered you a job because he wa
nted sex.”

  She stared at him. The innards of the toaster were fading like a tuning fork.

  “Okay,” Evan said. “Not all of them offered a partnership because they wanted sex.”

  The laugh came out of her on an exhale. And just that quickly, the distance between them almost vanished. There was always this moment in their fights—tightness and tension and then something like an orgasm without the lust. A release. It was almost worth the fight itself.

  Evan reached for her, his hand heavy on her hip bone.

  “I am good at what I do,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “We’re saying the same thing.”

  She nodded, even though she knew it wasn’t true.

  III.

  Lucia sat in the lobby, a green folder with the Conway deposition tucked under her arm, a vodka tonic in her hand, deciding whether to eat in the hotel restaurant or order room service. She was in no hurry to decide. The hotel had constructed a fake wilderness between the check-in desk and the restaurant, and she had chosen a seat in the shade of a rubber tree. Flower beds sprang from the carpet. A few inches from her feet, the turquoise water of an indoor stream wound all the way to the elevator bank, and ducks splashed nearby. Barry Manilow was playing on the hotel speakers. Every bit of it was false, and yet it was a scene well set.

  A man stood underneath a different rubber tree. Dark haired and towering, gray pants and a white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, holding a glass of red wine. He caught her eye—she thought he caught her eye. Before Evan, she’d never dated a blonde or a man under six feet. With Evan she got the dark hair but not the height, not that it ever mattered.

  She got this feeling in hotels occasionally. A remnant. She still—especially after a drink—could look across the potted ferns, see a man approaching, and remember when that sight set the gears into motion. It was distinctly different, the imagined relationship from the actual. That man walking toward you wasn’t real, not in those first few seconds of forward motion. He was anything and everything, fill in the blanks, and then you married and you filled in the blanks. You never knew anyone as well as you knew the man you married, and that specificity was beautiful and deadening all at once.

  The man with the red wine smiled at her. She appreciated the breadth of his chest.

  She looked away, noticing the shamrocks sparkling along the front desk, each decoration as big as a basketball. She thought of how Rachel’s St. Patrick’s Day earrings hung nearly to her shoulders, green clovers glittering. It was a wonder that the girl’s earlobes weren’t stretched down to her chin. Last Halloween, Lucia had bought her a pair of light-up pumpkins that promised one hundred hours of battery life. Hopefully, they would still work this year.

  A goldfish flashed through the stream at her feet.

  She took a swallow of her drink, and she appreciated that it was more vodka than tonic. The man with the red wine had not moved.

  She did not want or need a different man. Yet still she pictured him walking toward her. He would say, “Do you think the ducks are real?” or he would say “I wouldn’t interrupt you if you were reading a book, but that looks like work.” She would know that it was a line, but it would be a reasonably smart line, and he would bring up, oh, he would keep with the jungle theme and ask if she’d read any Jane Goodall, and they’d talk about In the Shadow of Man. At some stage he would mention grabbing a drink together, and she would say, “No, I’m sorry. I’m married.” He would ask her to go for the drink anyway.

  A hotel lobby opened up some sort of portal, a different life entirely.

  She never fantasized about going up to a man’s room. But she did imagine the drink. A brush of hand against hand, accident or strategy? In this alternate lobby world, she would slide her finger up the stem of her glass, and she would watch his eyes follow the movement. She would cross her legs, and her knee would touch his, and if the scenario managed to play through fully, it ended with her saying good night and leaving him there.

  Even in her fantasies, she could not imagine anyone but Evan.

  Still.

  She sank more deeply into her armchair, and a duck, emerald headed, floated past. A second and third duck followed. She watched the flash of their orange feet as they paddled. She sipped away half her drink, and she did not think of unknown men but of the Conway case, which nagged at her because she still hadn’t come up with any evidence of the husband’s affair. She had come to Louisville to depose a former nanny who had seen both parents with their children. This nanny had helpful things to say about Sara Conway’s warmth as a mother. She’d had nothing negative to say about Earl Conway, and that was fine.

  Maybe there hadn’t been an affair. Maybe Sara Conway had imagined it. But the truth was that her husband had left her, and when the man did the leaving, he usually had some other woman waiting.

  Lucia glanced over, seeing a space where the tall man had been sitting, and even as she turned her head, a shadow fell across her lap. The shadow belonged to someone neither dark nor handsome. A round woman, waist overflowing her khaki slacks, stood by the arm of Lucia’s chair. She wore a pin-striped shirt that identified her as staff, and her lipstick did not quite match the outline of her mouth. The woman held one arm close to her side, cradling several dinner rolls.

  Seeing her, a duck sauntered up the concrete bank of the stream, teetering for a moment on the edge.

  “They’ll peck if you try to touch them,” the woman said. “They’re skittish.”

  “I wasn’t going to touch them,” Lucia answered.

  The woman maneuvered a roll into her hand and began to break off bits of crust and toss them into the water. The duck slid back into the water, and others from all over the lobby started making their way toward the crumbs.

  “You want to toss some?” the woman asked, offering her a roll.

  “Okay,” Lucia said, accepting it.

  “They know me,” the woman said. “I’m the only one who feeds them. I feed the koi, too. They love grapefruit. Did you know koi have back teeth?”

  “You feed them grapefruit?” asked Lucia.

  “I’m not supposed to feed them at all.”

  Another duck—pure white—scaled the concrete wall of the creek and stomped toward the woman’s smudged Keds.

  Lucia watched the ducks climb over one another, and she thought about diet. The nanny had mentioned that Earl Conway’s mother was a nice old woman, good with the grandkids, and this was meant as a mark in Earl’s favor. The nanny was a chatty sort of girl. She’d offered up that the grandmother had an ulcer, and almost everything upset her stomach. She ate a lot of cornbread and milk.

  Lucia threw her bread, and it fell on the ducks like manna.

  Earl Conway had started dutifully visiting his frail mother a few months ago, spending the night with her once a week. There were no hotel rooms charged on his card for those nights, so Lucia had assumed he was telling the truth about the visit. But there were also restaurant charges, high-end ones, and was a woman with stomach ulcers really spending time at steak houses? Was he spending those nights in his childhood bed or in some other bed altogether?

  “So you’re not supposed to feed them?” she asked the duck woman. “Do they have, oh, an official feeder?”

  The woman shredded half a roll before she answered. “No one is supposed to feed them.”

  “What are they supposed to eat then?” asked Lucia.

  “Algae off rocks!” The woman looked at Lucia head-on for the first time. Her lips held the shape of each word for a split second too long. “Isn’t that horrible? You shut up a living thing for its whole life and you tell it that it has to suck its food off a rock? No, I don’t think so. I won’t stand for it, no ma’am.”

  Lucia had never seen such rage channeled by way of ducks, and it amazed her still how fascinating people could be. She listened to them talk all day long, and th
ey could be cruel or dull or stupid, but often they were mesmerizing.

  “So you take care of them,” she said. “Even though you’re not supposed to.”

  The woman nodded. “Some of the other staff say, ‘It’s against the rules, Sheila, you can’t do that.’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m nearly seventy years old and I don’t give a rat’s patootie if it’s against the rules.’”

  She—Sheila—pointed to the scrum of ducks.

  “That duck there is a male chauvinist,” she said. “The brown one with the white splotch. He’ll grab the other ducks by their beaks and yank them around, especially the females. He’s such a jerk. But there’s a female duck who will yank him back. It’s a wonderful thing.”

  Lucia picked up a roll that had fallen. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Twenty years, give or take. That speckled one there’s gimpy. Could be natural causes, but you can’t tell. There was a kid here not long ago throwing ice at them—Ice! It could kill them!—and I went to the ice machine and walked up behind him and pegged him right on the back of the neck. The look on his face!

  “‘How’s it feel?’ I said to him. And do you know what he says?”

  “What?” asked Lucia, caught up entirely.

  “He calls me a bitch,” Sheila said, her bread-free hands landing on her hips. “Can you imagine? A twelve-year-old. And I can see the little girls at the front desk, smiling. Smiling. They think I’m a bitch, too. But I don’t care. The manager comes over, sticking out his chest, telling me to apologize because the boy’s parents can sue, just for me throwing ice. I say, fine. I apologize. The girls are still at the desk, covering their mouths with both hands, and they’re enjoying the scene. I say to the manager—he quit last year, went into some sort of business with fake fireplace logs—I say, ‘Now, Barry, if he’d killed one of those ducks—’”

  “‘You call me Mr. Price,’ he says to me. Mr. Price. Likes he’s the principal, and I’m a kindergartner. I wanted to say, all right, Barry, how about I call you whatever I want, and you and those girls at the desk call me whatever they want.”