Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  “You don’t think a man should solve your problems?”

  “No.”

  “Or kill the bugs?”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  He laughed again, and he smoothed a wrinkle in his shorts. Maybe he was a runner. I remembered how I’d disliked the way he puffed out his chest while he was watering his yard, but I didn’t see it that way now. He looked like he exercised. He looked solid.

  “A women’s libber,” he said. “Who knew? I haven’t had one of those in ages.”

  That confused me until I realized he was looking at my drink. It was the kind of look that made it seem like I’d be rude if I didn’t offer.

  “You want a sip?” I asked.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  I hadn’t expected him to accept, but I handed the cup over, and he popped off the plastic cover to drink from the side. I appreciated that he didn’t use my straw.

  “Is this where you hang out on a Saturday?” he said, handing back my Icee. “Not the mall or the Dairy Queen parking lot?”

  “No,” I said, and now I was the one being slow to recognize a joke. “The Dairy Queen parking lot, Mr. Cleary?”

  “That’s what we used to do. You can call me Grant, by the way. Which is my actual name. I’m not a thousand years old or your teacher—I’m twenty-nine. So Grant, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I looked over my shoulder, checking for Mom again. Mr. Cleary—or whoever—lifted his cart onto two wheels and made a sharp turn, heading toward the cash registers.

  “Good luck with the ironing board,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  He stopped. “Rachel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I liked the shorts better.”

  I laughed.

  He had disappeared through the checkout lines by the time I finally found Mom, who had gone all the way to the Icee counter looking for me. I carried our ironing board back to the sun-soaked car.

  “Bend at your knees,” Mom said as I lifted it into the backseat, trying to catch the right angle. “Bend your knees, Rachel. You’re bending at your back—you know how that can—”

  “Mom,” I said. “It’s in the car.”

  When I grabbed my copy of Burroughs’s Back to the Stone Age from the floorboard, it was warm, like a pet who’d been waiting. I opened the book before Mom had even turned on the car, and she made a croupy sound that meant You read way too much. I turned the page.

  We were stopped at a light, just about to turn left onto the bypass, when Mom’s brake light came on.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  I put down my book. “What?”

  “The brakes.”

  She pointed at the dashboard, and I could see the light. There was a line of cars behind us.

  “Should we stop at the gas station on the way home?” I asked.

  The light turned green, and the car in front of us moved. Mom did not push the gas pedal.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Something’s wrong with the brakes,” she said. “That’s very serious.”

  The car behind us honked.

  “You have to go,” I said.

  The car behind us honked again. Somewhere farther down the line, a different car honked.

  “Mom! Go!” I said, and I shook her shoulder. Her head jerked back and forth, and when she faced me, her eyes were too wide.

  “Step on the gas,” I said, not yelling this time. “Go through the light and make your turn.”

  She did it. She drove too slowly, and the car behind us swerved into the other lane, honking again. It didn’t matter, though, because we were on the bypass, and we were moving.

  “What if they stop working?” she said. “I’m pumping them a little, and they seem like they’re okay, but, Rachel, if the brakes cut out—”

  “It’s a warning light,” I said. “It’s only the light. It just means we should have someone look at the brakes. Keep driving.”

  A couple of tears cut a path through her foundation and powder. Her mascara would run soon. A red pickup veered around us, a bald man frowning at us from the passenger window. I looked at the speedometer. She was going twenty miles under the speed limit.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “What?”

  She stopped panting, at least. She even looked away from the road for a second.

  “There,” I said. “In that Chevron. Let me drive. I’ll take care of it, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and her hand landed on mine. Her skin was cold, but I tightened my fingers around hers. That only lasted a second before she recentered her grip, sharp knuckled, on the steering wheel.

  “Turn,” I said, pointing. “Turn there. Park in that spot by the dumpster. Now trade places with me.”

  She nodded and did what I said. I left my book on the seat, and I switched places with her, waiting until she was buckled before I put the car in reverse.

  “You okay?” I asked, and I thought of how it might not be the worst thing to have someone who solved your problems.

  “Drive to the place on Carter Hill,” she said. “I think they’re open on Saturday.”

  I tapped the brakes, which seemed fine.

  I waited for a gap in the cars, and I pulled back onto the bypass, too slowly. I checked the brakes again—still fine—and I thought about whether eyeglasses would stay on securely while riding on horseback or attacking a cave bear, and it seemed possible that you could fasten them with some sort of leather cord or vine. They would be a better choice than contacts, surely, although the glass could shatter during hand-to-hand combat.

  A bow and arrow?

  It was worth considering.

  IV.

  I leaned back against my antique four-poster bed, which had belonged to my great-grandmother. She died when I was a baby, but I thought plenty about her and this curlicued bed. The wood squeaked and brayed every time I scratched my leg or fluffed my pillow, and I wondered about my great-grandparents trying to get romantic in a farmhouse full of kids. Had they gone ahead and had sex knowing that their kids could hear every bounce? Did they slip off to the outhouse or something?

  I centered my lap desk on my legs, and even that small shift made the bed whine underneath me. I chewed my pen and reread what I had written so far:

  Dear Ms. Powers:

  I share your interest in protecting African wildlife. I read a story about how you liked to help wounded animals when you were a child, and I used to do the same thing. I found a ring-necked dove once that had flown into our window, and I fed it bits of bread and water from a medicine dropper. I would love to help in any way possible on your preserve in Kenya. Do you have an internship program? If so, do you let high school students apply? I am available for the summer of 1982.

  I have an A average and have only one B so far in my high school career, which was in Algebra II. (I don’t expect you need an Algebra expert with lions and elephants.) I know this might seem like a strange request, so let me sweeten the pot. I will do absolutely anything that would be helpful—I will shovel pens or wash llamas. If you don’t need help in Kenya, I’d be happy to do any sort of personal assistant work for you in California. I will answer your fan mail or walk your dogs or make your coffee.

  I could see the weak spots. My algebra joke was forced. And “sweeten the pot”? But here was the big question: would these few paragraphs make Stefanie Powers think, ah, this is a girl I would like to meet?

  Probably not.

  I had already mailed letters to Carol Burnett (who I’d read responded to all her fan mail) and Frank Inn (he trained Benji, and I had made a strong case for how I had once tried to teach Aunt Molly’s Scottish terrier to dial a telephone, based on a scene in Oh! Heavenly Dog).

  “Rachel,” Mom called from the other side of the bedroom doo
r.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you tidied your room?”

  “I will.”

  “By the time we leave for Molly’s,” she said. “I mean it. Dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Clean clothes in the drawers.”

  “All right.”

  “I want the drawers to actually close, Rachel. No wadded-up clothes sticking out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Or maybe I didn’t want to go to Kenya. Maybe I wanted to stay in my bedroom, which I had no interest in tidying. Clothes, dirty and clean, covered the floor. College brochures—Duke and Vanderbilt and UNC and Amherst and Colgate—covered my vanity. I did need to put those away because Mom huffed when she saw them, and she said it was because of money, but it wasn’t. I had a plate with dried ketchup on my bedside table, plus a cup of half-drunk hot chocolate that had been congealing for days. I had stationery and envelopes and books scattered across my sheets. I needed The Complete Encyclopedia of Celebrity Addresses for obvious logistical reasons, but I felt a deeper craving for At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar and Land of Terror, where the bare-chested hero barreled from bear attack to ice cliffs to kidnapping, spending more time considering the thickness of ice than the possibility of death or failure. The hero in those books did not seem to consider much of anything, really, and that would not be a bad way to live.

  You’ll get scholarship money, my English teacher had told me. Just fill out the applications, and, I promise, you’ll have options.

  I kicked at my flowered bedspread until it slid to the floor. I mostly wanted the option of a deep hole that took me to the center of the earth, the kind of place where you could show up and kill a few raging beasts, fall in love, and get yourself declared emperor. I wanted to disappear into a cave and turn myself into someone else.

  The best I could do was to keep my door closed.

  Lucia

  I.

  The oven timer would not stop buzzing. Lucia considered the frozen hands on the dial. It was a cheap panel. The whole mechanism was likely only a few wheels and gears underneath the console.

  When the phone rang, at first she thought the timer had reached a new level of malfunction. That only lasted through the first ring, though, and then she yanked the receiver from the cradle.

  “Hello?” she said, trying to move away from the buzzing.

  “Lucia,” said a man’s voice. “You haven’t returned my calls. It’s Chris Sanderson.”

  “Hey, Chris,” she said. “Should I be calling you ‘lieutenant’?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “In fairness, I’ve only ignored one call, and it was from this morning. I was going to call you back. I assumed you wanted to give me an update.”

  It occurred to her that she should buy Chris Sanderson lunch. When she’d caught him at his desk on the evening of the shooting, he’d been matter of fact and efficient, no time wasted on shock or horror. Not only had he kept the shooting out of the newspaper, he’d called her every month with an update on the case, which she assumed was far below a police lieutenant’s pay grade. It wasn’t his fault that he never had any actual news. He’d tell her that sooner or later something would likely turn up. He’d tell her to let him know if she saw any signs of trouble at home or work.

  “Yes,” he said now. “I have an update. We’ve found him.”

  As soon as he said it, Lucia realized she’d stopped expecting this phone call. She’d stopped even hoping for it.

  “You found the shooter?” she asked.

  The buzzing from the stove continued, a low steady distraction. She pressed her ear against the receiver.

  “He was arrested two days ago for firing several shots at a neighbor,” Chris said. “Apparently the neighbor crossed into this man’s backyard, looking for a cat, and the man pulled out his twenty-two rifle. He clipped the neighbor in the arm. Nothing serious, but it’s still assault with a deadly weapon. The gun is the same one fired at your house.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “We’re sure. His name is Jerry Mackintosh.”

  Lucia considered. The stove hummed along.

  “He hasn’t been in town long,” Chris continued. “He moved here at the end of last year, right around the time of the shooting at your place. He rents an apartment over by Eastdale Mall. Works at AmSouth as a loan officer.”

  “The name isn’t familiar,” she said.

  None of it was familiar. It had occurred to Lucia, of course, that the shooter could be someone she hadn’t met, someone she’d seen only across a courtroom or as a name on a document. But she had expected the name to mean something. She’d expected that if someone ever gave her that much, she could start making sense of it all.

  “Mackintosh,” repeated the lieutenant slowly, as if maybe enunciation had been the problem. “Maybe someone in his family?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I’ll check my records. I’ll check with my secretary. I’ll see if anything comes to me.”

  She wasn’t sure if his next sound was a yawn or a sigh.

  “We need to tie him to you, Lucia,” he said. “You know the gun isn’t enough to get a warrant. No way to prove that it hasn’t changed hands a dozen times since the shooting at your house. I’ll sit down and talk to him and see what I can get, but if he doesn’t offer up anything—you didn’t get even a glimpse of the shooter?”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “After I talk to him, I’ll check back with you. We could try a photo lineup, too, and see if that sparks anything. In the meantime, you check your records, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “Listen,” Chris said, “he’ll likely get out on bond tomorrow, unless we magically come up with something. Since he hasn’t made any move toward you since December, I can’t imagine he’d risk coming near you now. But keep an eye out. His court date for this incident with the neighbor is set for next month. April twentieth.”

  Her ear hurt from pressing it against the receiver. She switched the phone to her other ear, the cord tangling. She spun, lifting the cord over her head, and, hell, the buzzing was definitely getting louder.

  “This one will likely be a felony,” Chris said. “He’s got a previous arrest for assault in Georgia. Even if we can’t make a case for the shooting at your house, he’s looking at maybe five years.”

  When Lucia hung up, she stripped off her pantyhose and settled her briefcase more firmly on the counter. She should feel relief, shouldn’t she? She finally knew the gunman’s name, and he was in jail, at least for the moment, and whatever legal i’s needed to be dotted and t’s crossed, this was surely the man. If they couldn’t tie him to the crime—well, they would. They would, and even if they didn’t, the man would spend time in prison. She should feel something more than the desire to lie down and close her eyes.

  She tugged at the zipper of her briefcase, which had snagged on a loose piece of paper. She worked a fingernail into the metal teeth, prying loose a Post-it note, and she scanned the few words taken down in Marissa’s neat cursive: Jake from Louisville. No message, but a number where she could reach him.

  Lucia slid the note in a circle, enjoying the rasp of paper on the countertop. When she flicked the little square toward the trash can, it missed by a few inches, floating to the tile.

  She couldn’t think with the buzzing.

  She propped her elbows on the stove, avoiding the burners, and considered the logistics. Did they actually need to call a repairman? She couldn’t remember which electrician they had used last—Had they called him for the igniter in this same stove? The fluttering in the overhead lights?

  “So?” she heard Evan’s voice say.

  Her husband was standing in the den, not five feet away. She wondered how long he’d been there.

  “I thought you were in the bedroom,” she said.

  “I was,”
he said. “Who was it on the phone?”

  “Chris Sanderson,” she said. “I’m guessing you heard at least part of it?”

  He lowered himself to the middle of the couch. “They found out something?”

  Lucia knelt down and picked up the yellow sheet of paper, wedging it inside the trash can underneath an empty roll of Scotch tape.

  “They think they’ve found the guy who shot at the house,” she said. “He shot at someone else, and the gun matched the bullets they found here. I’ve never heard of the guy. Jerry Mackintosh. He lives over by Eastdale Mall. He moved here in December, apparently. Nothing about him sounds familiar.”

  “Did he move before or after the shooting?” Evan asked.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “So why did he do it? What has he said?”

  “He hasn’t said anything,” she said. She watched him from across the countertop. “They haven’t questioned him yet. They just got the results about the bullets. And the bullets alone aren’t enough to—well, they’re still working on it. That’s all I know.”

  “Did you ask any questions at all?”

  “I asked plenty,” she said, exasperated. “God, Evan, it came out of the blue. I’ll try to compile a more thorough list of questions and call Chris back.”

  He rubbed his hands along the couch cushions, back and forth.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay. I’ll find out more. I’m just now absorbing it all.”

  “He’s in jail, I take it?”

  “He is,” Lucia said, and it was the truth. The specifics of bond seemed like a complication not worth explaining. She stepped back to the oven, pushing at the timer with her palm, pressing the stem of the clock. She took away her hand. The buzzing was undiminished.

  “You should tell Rachel,” Evan said.

  “What?” she said.

  “She’ll be thrilled that she can come back over.”

  “I’m not sure she should.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure her mother would let her. And I’m not sure she’d want to come. Don’t you think she might still be shaken up?”