Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  “Did she say that?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.”

  She turned back to the oven. She was stammering like a teenager, stumbling over her words. She slammed the heel of her palm against the squawking timer, hard enough that her hand absorbed the round imprint of the clock stem. It stung, and she flexed her fist.

  “You haven’t talked to her since when?” said Evan.

  “December.”

  He pushed off the couch, and then he was right next to her, too close. The smell of Juicy Fruit.

  “You knew that,” she said. “I told you that I’d promised her mother I would keep my distance.”

  The fact that he apparently did not know it left her feeling adrift. It was the sort of question that showed he’d been living a life completely separate from hers.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You said her mother didn’t want her over here. I get her mother being nervous. But you cut off all contact with Rachel? You haven’t even called her? Bullets fly at her, and then you abandon her?”

  “I haven’t abandoned her,” she said.

  She turned so she didn’t have to breathe his gum breath. She did not think she could explain it to him, and she was not sure she should have to. Surely it didn’t matter, ultimately, if Rachel sat on this particular couch or watched this particular dog gnaw her hind leg. Yes, Lucia missed her. Yes, she’d felt kinship and affection and she’d felt needed in some blurred way, as if she might be the answer to a question Rachel hadn’t quite asked. This tipped uncomfortably into the nursery-rhyme rhythm of make a difference and have an impact and reach out and touch someone—and so what if she had felt it? She had also believed that the two of them were safe sitting in her sunroom chatting about the ABC prime-time lineup and true love. She’d believed that if she agreed to sell this house, the tension between her and Evan would ease. She’d believed that if she ever got the name of who had fired that gun, she would understand what had happened. But none of it had lined up as neatly as she’d imagined.

  “Margaret is her mother,” she said.

  “Technically, yes,” Evan said. “All right, that was nasty. Yes, she’s Rachel’s mother. But what are you? You’re something.”

  She shook her head.

  “I got some good news,” she said.

  He stepped back, nearly tripping over Moxie, who had materialized on the kitchen floor. “Other than the man who tried to kill you being caught?”

  Lucia absorbed that. They spoke to each other with such sawed-off words. She had thought this was a bad couple of days and then a bad couple of weeks, but increasingly she was afraid that it was a downward slide into the kind of marriage she swore she would never have.

  No, she never swore it. She never even considered it a possibility. She never thought she and Evan could be anything other than happy. She thought—secretly, unspoken—that the biggest determinant of a good marriage was choosing well in the first place. She had done that. And although she knew it was possible that they could work through this, she also knew that if you lost some fundamental joy in each other, it was gone. No amount of counseling or good intentions could bring it back.

  Sometimes, late at night, she was sure that they had lost it.

  “Yes,” she said to him. “Other than that. I got a call today that the Montgomery County Women’s Alliance has selected me as the Woman of the Year. They said they want to recognize me for, oh, ‘advancing the rights of women.’”

  Evan nodded. He jerked his head slightly, possibly trying to shake off—literally—his irritation over Rachel. Over all manner of things. She watched him. She expected him to tell her once again that when she did these sorts of events, it only announced her location to the crazies.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said instead. “Congratulations.”

  “The ceremony is in a couple of weeks,” she said. “April second. There’s a fancy dinner at the McNally House, and then I give a speech. There might even be a trophy.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  She could tell he expected her to object, and she didn’t know why. “Great. I was assuming you’d be my date. I thought I’d invite Mom and Dad, too.”

  “They’d have to drive at night,” Evan said. “He’ll tell you to bring the gun.”

  “And she’ll tell me to wear a girdle.”

  “Do you own a girdle?”

  “I do not,” she said.

  “Don’t wear a girdle. Or a bra.”

  She smiled. The joy was not gone between them, not yet. It just faded in and out, the reception spotty.

  II.

  Katherine Jemison walked through Lucia’s doorway, unsmiling, which was surprising. Men, under duress, were comfortable with a nod. Women, though—even if they thought they were going to lose their husband or their house or their children—they smiled. They asked Lucia how she was doing and they told her they liked the shade of red on her walls or the hardwood floors. If they were going to rage or weep, they only did it after they smiled.

  “I can’t thank you enough for this,” Katherine said, offering a press-and-release hug, brisk.

  As she stepped back, her chin brushed Lucia’s forehead. Her dark hair hung wavy and jaw length; her tanned face was scrubbed. Back in Lucia’s Legal Aid days, there’d been a handful of women—a surgeon, a couple of professors, a bank vice president, plus Katherine Jemison and Lucia—who’d kept spotting each other across banquet rooms full of men in suits. They came together and cohered. Lucia had chatted with Katherine over occasional chicken salads and tuna melts for years until the other woman moved to Mobile after her divorce.

  “Surely it’s unusual to take a client from out of town?” Katherine said, dropping into the leather chair across from Lucia’s. Her purse thudded to the floor. “I can’t believe you said yes. I don’t know—this somehow feels more serious than the actual divorce. Child endangerment? I can’t believe Bert is doing this.”

  Lucia waited: sometimes the insults showed her something important. Sometimes not. Regardless, Katherine did not expand on her ex-husband’s faults.

  “I’m glad you called me,” said Lucia, sitting. “How’s Miranda doing?”

  They talked a bit about Katherine’s twelve-year-old daughter—her good grades and her obsession with Anne of Green Gables—and when Katherine’s shoulders had relaxed, Lucia skimmed a hand over the papers on her desk and explained how the meeting would work. They would parse each line of the ex-husband’s petition to modify the final order of divorce. They would chat. By the end, they’d have laid out all the information so they could get a good clear look at it.

  “So you took Miranda to Rio de Janeiro in January?” Lucia asked.

  “Yes,” said Katherine.

  She did not elaborate, which made Lucia nod with approval. “And what did the two of you do on that trip?”

  Katherine glanced at the molding of the ceiling then back at Lucia. She might as well have been sitting in front of a class reading some scientific paper on plankton. But when she crossed her legs, Lucia watched her ankle-booted foot twitch wildly, as if it were conducting an unseen orchestra.

  “It was a short trip,” Katherine said. “Just over a week. I was working with colleagues at the Universidade Federal, gathering samples from Guanabara Bay. You remember the oil spill a few years ago? It was seventy thousand barrels into the bay. The question is whether the mangrove swamps can recover. There’s always been a pollution issue there, but domestic sewage and industrial waste is a different animal entirely from—how much detail do you want about my research?”

  “That’s good. In court, you’d want to give the sort of general answer you’d give at a dinner party.”

  The ankle boot circled and twitched. It always impressed Lucia in the courtroom when she studied a confident face and steady voice, then looked under the table and saw all the nerves,
channeled.

  “And the judge?” Katherine asked. “What will he want to see from me?”

  It was the most important question, in some ways. It was amazing how few people thought to ask it.

  “Competence,” Lucia said. “Warmth. No need to mention Cornell or degrees of any kind unless you’re asked directly. Your ex-husband’s lawyer is likely going to try to show that you’re more concerned with specimens under a microscope than your daughter. So minimize how much you talk about work.”

  “Even when they ask about it?”

  “Even then,” said Lucia.

  “Do you think ‘workaholic’ is the only thing they’ll call me?”

  Lucia lifted the corner of one typed sheet and then let it fall. This was, actually, the question that most concerned her.

  “Don’t forget that your ex-husband has the burden of proof, whatever his claims,” she said. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “I am not,” said Katherine mildly. “I’ve gone on a grand total of four dates in the past two years. My options are not extensive. I’ve never brought anyone home to meet Miranda.”

  “There’s no reason to believe he’s taking that angle,” Lucia said. “Let’s get back to the trip itself. You’re gathering samples. What does that mean, day to day?”

  “My colleagues and I made several trips out on the bay. There were three of us per small motor boat. We had four sampling stations along the coast, each in a different mangrove forest. In the morning we’d gather sediment and leaf samples. In the afternoon, we’d go back to the lab—”

  “Where was Miranda while you worked?” asked Lucia.

  “She stayed with Roberta, my colleague’s wife. The two of them visited a couple of tourist sites, but mostly they stayed at home. They, oh, cooked Brazilian cheese bread and fudge balls. Miranda practiced her Portuguese. Roberta and her husband live in a nice neighborhood in a lovely sobrado—”

  “Sobrado?” said Lucia.

  “A loft.”

  “Say ‘loft.’ And if you name the university that sponsors the research, call it the Federal University. There’s no advantage in speaking Spanish. Or Portuguese.”

  This had been an issue in a previous custody case where the mother wanted to move back to her parents’ house in Arizona, which she kept calling a “casita.” Lucia had watched the judge’s face screw tighter with every repetition, clearly imagining sticks stuck together with mud. While it was not the entire reason they lost the case, it had not helped.

  She waited for Katherine to argue, but the other woman only nodded.

  “All right. My point is that while I was working, my daughter spent her days with a competent adult in a safe neighborhood, essentially baking cookies and learning about a foreign culture.”

  “Good,” said Lucia. She had nearly forgotten how much she liked this woman. “That’s good. So Miranda was never alone in Rio?”

  “Never.”

  “The petition mentions the murder rate in the city. The statistic alone isn’t a problem. Your husband would have to prove she was actually in danger. Was Miranda threatened at all? Did she see any violence?”

  “None,” said Katherine. “No blood, no guns, no criminal activity.”

  “What does he mean by the phrase, ‘allowing inappropriate contact with prostitutes’?”

  Katherine smiled for the first time. “We walked to a food market one morning, and we passed a couple of hookers. It was obvious—one of them wore a see-through blouse. The other one reached out to Miranda and caught a piece of her hair. Very gently. It’s curly blond, do you remember? The woman said it was pretty. Miranda said thank you, and she told the woman that she liked her hair, too. She was taken with the prostitute, that’s true enough.”

  She was still smiling.

  “You don’t want to do that in court,” Lucia said. “Don’t act amused.”

  “Well, of course not.” Katherine smoothed her hands over her knees. “I was thinking how I once read an interview with Dolly Parton talking about the first time she saw a ‘fallen woman’ with bleached hair and too much makeup and tight dresses, and she thought, ‘Yes. I want to be that.’”

  “Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke,” Lucia said, and she thought of Saturday nights sitting on her parents’ couch, her cold toes tucked under her father’s thigh. “There is an appeal.”

  “I was proud, actually, of how kind Miranda was,” Katherine said. “The woman just came lurching across the sidewalk. But Miranda was gracious. They really like blond hair there. You’d be popular.”

  “I get touched enough in this country, thank you,” said Lucia.

  Katherine tilted her head, and the polite confusion in her expression struck Lucia. She wondered how often men groped a botanist. Even sitting, Katherine looked formidable. Broad across the shoulders, taller than some men. She was compelling but not pretty, and how much did prettiness have to do with the frequency of groping? Might height be a factor—sheer physical space occupied? Lucia considered that there might be some equation—if you were blonde and five foot three, you might be, say, three times more likely to have your ass remarked on as you left a courtroom than a solid five foot ten brunette. And if you avoided the ogling, did you pay a price for that lack of attention? There had been plenty of moments when Lucia had wished for more wrinkles or gray hair, and yet she knew that she would not make that trade, and was that because of vanity or because of power? If they were in a bar instead of in her office, she would ask Katherine’s opinion.

  “Miranda told her dad about the prostitute,” Katherine said. “She thought it was a funny story. Bert would have laughed at it. Before.”

  Lucia did wonder about Bert Jemison. She hadn’t spoken to Katherine at all during the divorce. In the event of a floundering marriage, friends either grilled her for free legal advice or they vanished entirely, self-conscious about trading on friendship. Katherine had been in the latter group. Lucia found out about the divorce over lunch with a mutual friend: it was not every day that someone they knew told her husband she was leaving him because she preferred women. But instead of making Katherine’s sexual preference an issue in the divorce, Bert had named only “irreconcilable differences.” That did not seem like the action of a mean-spirited man.

  Had his sense of aggrievement intensified? Would he belatedly bring sex into this? Lucia did not relish that scenario. If he chose to go that route—and if he got the right judge—Katherine would likely lose her daughter.

  “He mentions Mexico,” Lucia said. “When did you take Miranda there?”

  “I’m not sure what he means,” Katherine said. “I took her to New Mexico last year. Las Cruces. It was a conference.”

  Lucia felt a swell of anticipation, like when her younger self was bodysurfing chest deep in the Gulf and she spotted a ripe, easy wave she knew she would catch just right.

  “You took her to New Mexico—never Mexico?” she said.

  “Correct.”

  “And your ex-husband—”

  Katherine smiled for the second time. “Does not seem to recognize the difference.”

  Lucia looked down at her desk drawer, which was slightly open, showing paper clips and two pens, both from Rachel. A hot-air balloon floated in one of them, and the other was topped with a woodpecker on a spring.

  “If you have any contact with him,” she said, “don’t correct him. Was there anything else about the Rio trip that he might possibly bring up?”

  “It was no more dangerous than going to Atlanta. Lord, Lucia, Bert’s never been out of the country. Once I thought he would—well, I don’t know: I suppose I gave him enough surprises.”

  Katherine leaned forward, feet flat on the floor. She no longer looked like she was reading a scientific paper.

  “The trip wasn’t dangerous,” she repeated. “It was—lovely. On our third day, Miranda and I hiked to an abandoned sixteen
-story hotel in the middle of the jungle—Esqueleto Hotel, which means Skeleton Hotel.” She flapped a hand. “I know. I’ll only say it in English. But the two of us and a few other tourists wandered through this beautiful ruin of a place, vines wrapping around the walls. Miranda ate cod balls. She tried coconut juice. She surfed, sort of. I didn’t visit a foreign country until I was thirty years old—two weeks in Costa Rica looking at high-altitude vegetation.”

  Something had loosened in Katherine. Her face was wide-eyed and open, and the words came fast. Lucia was not sorry to see it. She preferred to know—before the court date—what it looked like when the dam burst.

  “Bert wants her safe and tucked in,” Katherine said, “but so what if she meets a prostitute? So what if she sees breasts? She has them, for God’s sake. So what if she sees some ugliness and it makes her uncomfortable? Why should you want to feel comfortable and safe—where does that get you? She’s not safe. That’s a fairy tale. She’s going to suffer at some point. Bert can’t stop that, but he can stop her from falling off a surfboard or climbing on a plane, and maybe he can even stop her from wanting anything at all. And you know what? She still won’t be safe. He’s keeping himself comfortable, not her, the prick. I want her to know there’s a world out there. A whole world, waiting. And, yes, I know I sound like a bitch.”

  Lucia glanced at the pens again. “If you were a man, they’d say you were a prophet.”

  What difference would it have made, she wondered, if Rachel had this woman for a mother? The girl was dying to ride a train—any train, preferably the kind where murders happened—but other than that, the most exotic dream trip Lucia had ever heard her mention was the glass-bottom boat in Pensacola. What might she make of a trip to Brazil?

  “I won’t be a prophet or a bitch,” said Katherine, giving something close to a laugh. “I will be warm and loving, and I will be completely uninterested in sex with either gender, and I will talk about cooking and knitting and Wednesday night church services. I will be whoever I need to be.”