Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  She was not quite finished. Her hands flexed and unflexed.

  “Bert loves her. I know he loves her. But I wonder if he knows her at all or if he just sees some Miranda-shaped space and fills it in however he wants. How is she supposed to know what she wants? You have to see it first, don’t you, to know you want it? She begged to go on this trip. Do you think he’s even asked her for her opinion?”

  There, thought Lucia. This was the other thing that sometimes happened when the dam burst. She was back in the Gulf again, shell shards under her feet, and she looked out at the waves, too many to count. When a client overflowed, she watched the waves roll in. Sometimes the peaks were unmanageable. But often she could pick one that was coming at just the right angle. The perfect arc. She saw what was there, ebbing and flowing, but what she did in this moment also had a hint of Poseidon. She could sometimes control the waves. She could take a thought and shape it into something you could ride all the way to shore.

  “That’s the ideal tone,” she said. “It’s important that she asked to go. And that he never asked her what she thought. You had an opportunity to add to her education, and you took it.”

  “Got it,” said Katherine. It was a bonus for Lucia that this woman understood that you could be real and engineered at the same time.

  III.

  When she was the only one in the house, the buzzing oven timer sounded louder. Lucia added a scoop of food to Moxie’s bowl, then pulled out the Conway folder, since the trial would start in two days. She nested on her usual corner of the couch, and she stared at the first page of the deposition summary, but there was no concentrating.

  She’d gone by the police station and looked at photos of middle-aged white men today, and she had recognized no one. Not the slightest spark of familiarity, although that failure was not what was distracting her, surely. The humming. She could not unhear the humming. The more she tried to block it out, the louder it got. She’d gone to the store to buy more foundation—Lancôme, porcelain—and she’d walked out with a multicolored bangle bracelet that had made her think of Rachel. It was the third gift she had bought the girl in the past months, all undelivered.

  The house was so empty. It was louder without Evan in it.

  He had been gone for the last two days to a conference in Chicago. She’d had another call at the office from Jake. Another yellow square left on her desk. Could the man not take a hint? Now that she was back in her home, she was mystified by the woman who had sipped a martini with a stranger in the middle of an indoor forest. She had spent a pleasant half hour with him and then she’d headed to her room, and who knew if he would have asked her for more than a drink? She hadn’t given him the chance. It must have taken some work on his part to find her work number—she didn’t recall giving him her last name—and she distrusted any man who made that sort of effort for a woman who had shown no interest.

  She could not fathom why she had constructed shallow hotel scenarios. Everything she had ever wanted was in this house, or rather, it was most nights. Now the stove was the only thing talking to her, and the room was crowded with empty spaces. She should not have pushed Rachel away. She had made a mistake there, and she must have made a mistake with Evan, too, although she was not sure what it was. She thought, still, soul mates. She did not want them to drift any further away from each other, and yet she did not know how to change their trajectory. He would be home tonight, and she was euphoric at the thought of him, but she wondered if she would love him as clearly and sharply when he was sitting next to her.

  The stove. Dear God, it was driving her crazy. She stalked to the kitchen and stared at the timer, at the fragile panel framing the clock mechanism.

  She would fix this.

  She would fix it right now. Things did not just fix themselves, did they?

  The hammer, for once, was exactly where it was supposed to be. She yanked it loose from the junk drawer—the handle was wrapped in string and jammed inside a roll of duct tape. She did not recall ever buying a rubber band, and yet the drawer was clogged with them. A gentle tap, she thought. All she needed to do was to lightly tap the center of the clock face. It might knock the moving parts off track and stop the noise.

  She lifted her grandmother’s ancient cast-iron skillet off the front burner, setting it aside. She could still see the old woman wielding it—cornbread batter sizzling in hot Crisco oil—her pale forearms roped with muscle and striped with oven burns. Even when her leg was gone, she’d stalked through the kitchen, never holding on to a counter, not an ounce of caution in her. (How had that woman produced Lucia’s mother?) She rejected electric mixers, beating by hand until her arms gave out, and Lucia imagined that she found the ache necessary. It was proof of the work, and work was the lasso her grandmother laid down to keep the snakes away. If you worked hard enough—if you felt the effort in your joints and your muscles and behind your scratchy eyelids, if you worked well enough and long enough and you could manage to be good enough—well, then, everything would turn out fine.

  Lucia had never owned an electric mixer.

  She considered her angle, hammer in hand. She centered herself, her belly against the edge of the oven, the incessant whir sounding like a taunt. She tapped twice, directly on the knob in the center of the clock. The oven continued to whine. She tapped several more times, increasing the force, feeling each hit more deeply in her wrist. She imagined what lay behind the dull silver panel, back behind the knobs and numbers. She thought it must look something like a travel alarm clock.

  Moxie bumped against her knee, curious. Lucia stroked her head.

  She could destroy the clock. Easily. It made so much more sense than calling an electrician, which would take days, potentially, and likely cost hundreds of dollars, and all she needed to do was break the clock. She could break a clock. What kind of idiot couldn’t break a clock?

  She thought it as she continued hammering away, never missing her tiny target, each hit well calibrated. She could stop calibrating. That was an idea. She could stop being careful.

  She hit the knob harder. Five times. Each hit was more satisfying. On the sixth stroke, the glass shattered around the timer, the jagged pieces spraying across the burners and onto the countertop. The glass was thicker than she’d expected. The panel was naked now, hardly a remaining shard, and the whole contraption looked cheaper. The metal backing seemed no more solid than a sheet of notebook paper, so she went back to the tool drawer and traded her hammer for a pair of pliers. The metal peeled back like the top of a sardine can. This work was precise, gratifying in a different way. Her index finger was bleeding, but not enough to make a fuss over. Two drops of blood splatted next to the glass bits, and Lucia stopped to wrap a bit of paper towel around her knuckle and got back to work.

  The alarm was no longer just whirring. The sound now was louder and sharper. More like a leaf blower. The oven sounded threatened. Lucia poked and pulled the metal panel, peeling it farther back. She sliced her thumb, but she didn’t stop to wrap it, only wiped the blood against her thigh.

  Finally she managed to bend the metal on three sides, every edge turned petallike. Using her needle-nose pliers, she lifted the panel free, only it was not free. She found the gears of a clock, yes, but also a mass of electrical wiring, blue, yellow, and white. The wires were attached in at least four places to the clock mechanism.

  Whaaaaaaaaa, went the stove.

  She wiped her thumb again, another red streak across her thigh, and she was proud of the blood. The mechanism did not look anything like a travel alarm clock. It looked like a bomb.

  She should stop, she thought.

  She tugged at one of the wires, testing, and a jolt of electricity shot from her fingers up to her elbow. She dropped the mechanism, her arm slightly numb. Foolish, she thought. Dangerous. And yet she stared at the stove, metal ripped and torn, wires dangling, and she had come this far.

  She went
back to the drawer for the hammer. She aimed carefully, and she hit the mass of wires where it connected to the timer. Sparks flew, arcing like actual fireworks, and there was a popping sound and a brief rush of terror, but then the buzzing stopped. She stood there in the silence—silence!—with the hammer in her hand, and she felt an overwhelming satisfaction.

  Soon, though, she felt other things.

  Shame. Dread.

  She had utterly lost control.

  She could still hear the echo of the popping sound. The air smelled of burning. She reached for the oven and turned the cook setting from “Off” to “Bake,” watching for the power light to flash red. There was no light, though. Not when she tried to bake or broil, not on any temperature setting. The burners, too, were cold and dead.

  She had overdone herself.

  She wanted a vodka tonic, but she also wanted to tell Evan when he came home that she had not been drinking, so she made a cup of tea and sat down with the Conway file, and eventually Evan opened the door. Before he even set down his suitcase, she was standing.

  She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his neck, and he was saying hello and something else, but she cut him off.

  “I broke the oven,” she said.

  He shook his head once, frowning.

  “Oh,” he said. “You stopped the buzzing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s the good news.”

  He stepped around her into the kitchen. She watched him take in the sight: the metal panel, peeled back. The wires, bursting out like tentacles. The few glass fragments still attached to the control panel.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I broke the oven,” she repeated.

  “How?”

  She could not read his expression. She explained. He did not look away from the oven the entire time she talked.

  “A hammer?” he said finally.

  “Yeah.”

  “A hammer.” He glanced at her and then looked away. “Well, it was ancient anyway. We needed a new one.”

  She told herself that she should be relieved. He had not yelled or looked at her as if she had lost her mind. He had seemed surprised, but that was all. And yet she thought, Really? Is he so far away that I can rip apart our appliances and it doesn’t even phase him?

  An hour later, she hefted the iron skillet from the counter and considered whether she could use a crème brûlée torch to cook a frittata or whether cheese and crackers might make an acceptable dinner. She turned as Evan stepped into the kitchen, his Nikon camera in his hands. He loved that camera. He held it like a newborn, two handed and well supported.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He hip-checked her gently, taking her place in front of the stove. He twisted the lens of the camera, barely glancing at her.

  “I wanted a picture of this,” he said.

  He leaned closer to the ruined panel, and she’d always been confused about why you needed to be physically closer to a thing when you had a zoom lens. She watched him twist and sidestep, and she wondered if he was trying to document her descent into madness.

  “Why do you want a picture?” she asked.

  “Because it sums up what I love about you.”

  She absorbed that for a moment.

  “That I’m crazy?” she said.

  “That you don’t just sit there,” he said, and she was surprised to see that he was smiling at her. “This thing starts buzzing, and it won’t stop, and you don’t think, oh, well, I’ll just live with it. You don’t call someone and wait for them to come and fix it. You’re the Little Red Hen. I mean, I would have eventually called someone, but—let’s face it—it would have been next week. You went looking for a hammer.”

  He started to laugh and kept going until he had to brace himself against the edge of the stove. He slanted his face toward her, and it had been a long time since she had seen his face light up when he looked at her.

  “It was stupid,” she said.

  He poked at the exposed wires of the stove with one finger. “It wasn’t only stupid.”

  “You like that I’m the Little Red Hen?” she said. “Because it sometimes feels like—”

  “It feels like what?”

  “You don’t like how I do it myself.”

  He faced her, the whole mess of the stove behind him. Her wrist was feeling the weight of the iron skillet, and she eased it onto the counter.

  “Lucia,” her husband said, his face still alight. “It drives me crazy how you do it yourself. And I love how you do it yourself. It’s not an exact science.”

  He picked up the hammer, tossing it and catching it. She thought of him reaching onto a top shelf, handing down a bowl into her grandmother’s butter-slick hands. He had known almost everyone she had ever loved.

  “It feels satisfying, doesn’t it?” she said, as he flipped the hammer once more.

  “It does.”

  “I don’t want to leave this house.”

  “I know,” he said. “I don’t really want to move, either, but I think we should. We haven’t even had a solid offer for it yet, so who knows? But I imagine we’ll get an offer eventually and we’ll go back and forth a few hundred times and eventually we’ll figure it out.”

  He stepped behind her, and she assumed he was headed for the tool drawer until she saw his tie flick through the air. His arms came around her, and he looped the tie around her hips, pulling her against him, chest to thighs. She felt his stubble against her cheek, and she leaned against him as he held her there, lassoed.

  Rachel

  I.

  The mailman came by a little after 4:00 p.m., just like he always did. I walked barefoot down the driveway not long after that, just like I always did. I pulled a handful of mail out of the mailbox. The first two pieces were letters for Mom—bills, probably—but the third was a small box wrapped in brown paper with my name written on it.

  I had thoughts of Stefanie Powers until I recognized Lucia’s writing.

  I stood in the shade of Mr. Cleary’s pecan tree and I spun the box in my hands. The brown paper was folded, perfectly symmetrical, and the ends were slick with tape. I ripped open the wrapping, letting the paper fall to the concrete. The spider lilies lining the driveway tickled my legs.

  I was holding a white box—a jewelry box—and when I lifted the lid I saw a square note on a kind of stationery I’d never seen. It had a swirling texture, like fingerprints, and it was the almost the color of my skin. Lucia had written in a purple pen: I was thinking of you on St. Patrick’s Day, it read. I missed that window, but I’m early with these. I know how much you like holidays. I hope they don’t weigh down your ears.

  When I lifted the note, I found a pair of earrings, egg shaped. Almost actual egg sized. They were tacky and glitter covered, and I loved them, but I went back to the note and I soaked up Lucia’s writing.

  The last time I cried in public was at Charlotte’s Web when I was seven, but I started weeping over earrings, not able to do more than turn my face away from the road. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to have Lucia choose me. I had chosen her first, of course, but every time she poured me a ginger ale, she chose me back. When she took me to the Crab Shack for my birthday and snuck over ahead of time to arrange for cupcakes—she chose me. When she maneuvered this box exactly in the middle of the wrapping paper, making sure the tape was evenly spaced—she chose me. It was my name she had spelled out letter by letter. My mother didn’t get to pick me, but Lucia did, and that meant I was someone other than the girl who lived in this house.

  I was still standing next to the spider lilies when Mr. Cleary called my name. When I turned, I saw him standing on his front porch, his hands full of wires and cords. I pretended to cough, an excuse to swipe at my eyes.

  “I had an idea,” he said to me.

  He clearly hadn’t
noticed the crying.

  “What is it?” I said, and my voice sounded weird, but he didn’t notice that, either.

  He stepped into the grass, and I realized the cords he was holding were Christmas lights, long knotted strands of them.

  “I’m going to light the pool,” he said. “These things sit around in the basement all year long, and I’m going to make use of them.”

  I stepped into his yard, bits of shell and nut and root cutting into my feet. The shade was denser close to the trunk of the pecan tree.

  “You’re going to put lights in the pool?” I said.

  “Not in it,” he said. “Around it. Now I’m wondering about your science curriculum. You know the earth isn’t flat, right? And women weren’t created from a rib bone?”

  “My curriculum is fine,” I said. “I know you can’t put lights in a pool. I just wasn’t sure that you did.”

  He tilted his head. Now, of course, he chose to be observant.

  “You got a look on your face there,” he said. “I’m confident you don’t believe the earth is flat. Do you believe in Adam and Eve? The whole earth-in-seven-days notion?”

  “I—I believe in the Bible, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I apologize,” he said, and his voice had turned gentle. It didn’t suit him. “I shouldn’t have said that. There are multiple ways to read the Bible, and you seemed like you were—well, it just didn’t occur to me that you believed it was literal. Which is absolutely fine.”

  Standing there facing him, I couldn’t sort through my thoughts. I understood, of course, that plenty of people did not believe in the Bible, but he was implying something other than lack of belief.

  “You don’t believe it’s literal?” I said.

  “No.”

  “You don’t believe it’s true?”

  “That’s not quite the same thing. I don’t read it as a collection of facts.”

  “How do you read it?”

  He rolled his shoulders. He played with a loose loop of cord.