Family Law, Gin Phillips [top novels of all time .txt] 📗

She stood up, tightening her loose towel, and I stared at the television. Her footsteps were loud and heavy as she left the room. It was a joke, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I focused on Jennifer Hart taking off her fur in a train compartment, pouring champagne, smiling up at Jonathan, and soon there would surely be a charming sex reference. I thought of how I would love to ride in a train, the kind with beds attached to the walls. The kind where murders happened.

Mom banged around the kitchen, muttering. For someone talking to herself, her voice really carried.

I always say, she said. She used that phrase a lot with herself. I always say there’s no point, she said, and a cabinet door slammed. Margaret, she said, you know you do this every time, and you know how she is—

“I’m putting your lunch money in your purse,” she said, loud enough that she was clearly not talking to herself.

She liked to give me money when she was crying.

Then she was back in the room, pointing a pen at me, her face shiny and blotchy and hard. The pen had liquid inside, and when you turned it over, a Moxie-ish dog floated up through the liquid.

“Is this for Lucia?” she asked.

“That was in the bottom of my purse,” I said.

“Is this a present for her?”

“Why were you going through my purse?”

“I was putting your money in. Is this for her?”

Now she was avoiding saying Lucia’s name. Not good. Lucia racked up points in Mom’s usual categories—attractive, well dressed, good manners. Nice-looking husband who wore a suit to work. But Lucia scored well, too, in a whole different system, and I still hadn’t figured out how that affected Mom’s calculations. I was never sure whether Mom wanted to take me away from Lucia or take Lucia away from me.

“Yeah, it’s for her,” I said, because I had stalled as long as I could.

Mom dropped the pen on the couch and spun away from me. She stopped in front of the television, swiped at the volume knob, and suddenly I could hear the moths hitting the window. She insisted that burglars didn’t break into a well-lit house, but the floodlight brought the bugs by the hundreds.

“You never get me fun gifts,” she said.

That wasn’t true. On Mother’s Day two years earlier I’d gotten her a hilarious oven mitt that said One Hot Mama. She didn’t even smile when she opened the box. She stuffed it in a drawer and never took it out again, and so last Mother’s Day I got her candy-covered almonds like usual and she was much happier.

I watched the flying bodies smack against the glass, one after another.

Mom said more stuff, following me as I put the pen back in the side pocket of my purse. I imagined handing it to Lucia and how she tipped her head back when she laughed, like there was something funny overhead. I imagined leaving it on her doorstep, and I thought of the dusty gasoline smell of her carport.

Eventually Mom went to her bedroom, and I finished watching my show. That was how our nights worked: I picked my words carefully, but never carefully enough.

It wasn’t a bad ending.

Some nights were worse.

II.

The day before I met Lucia, my mother took her car into Mosely Brothers because the brakes were sticking, and she did that voice she does like, Oh goodness me, what is this strange contraption they call a car? How am I ever to understand its complicated pieces? I think I have a problem with this part called, oh, the brake? Brakes? Am I saying that right? Giggle giggle shrug smile. I cannot even imagine how you know all these big words, you impressive man in overalls, and won’t you please oh please fix it for me?

That’s a slight exaggeration.

But I said to her while we were sitting in the Mosely Brothers waiting room, with its light-up Coke machine and half-empty pot of coffee, “You’re smart, Mom. Why do you act like you don’t know anything?”

She cried. Right there in the waiting room.

Lucia had hot pink fingernails, shining, and my mother was big on never painting your nails brighter than a pale peach. Lucia’s eyes were deep and dark, and all the women in my family except for me had blue eyes. She was like someone out of a fairy tale, only in a suit.

She talked to me and she knew about movies, and right there in her lobby I wondered—I mean, I was only thirteen, so I didn’t have the right words, but it was something like—

Is this how you can be?

Lucia wasn’t afraid of anything.

You have to understand that on the day before a road trip, which usually meant visiting my grandmother in Huntsville, Mom always went to a full-service gas station to get the tires checked. I was unaware that women could use self-service gas stations. I had no idea that tire gauges were sold in stores.

Mom never drove on the interstate. She never drove at night.

My grandmother and aunt followed these rules as well. There were others. You never called a boy, even if it was to ask about a homework assignment. If you wanted to make a rum cake and you were out of rum, you needed to call up an uncle or a husband or a father, because a woman alone was not safe at a liquor store. (I imagined liquor stores as something out of Mad Max, with barbed wire and dust storms and men in spiked helmets whirring chains through the air.) You should never swim in the ocean because of riptides. Never leave your car without checking twice that you locked it. Never sleep on your face because you’ll get wrinkles. Never wear your bathing suit into the front yard to get the mail, because what if Mr. Cleary next door sees you? Never go to Kmart in cutoff shorts,