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

even if you’re in the middle of gardening and only need more potting soil, because what if someone sees you? Never stand at the bar in a restaurant, even if you’re waiting for a table, because what if someone sees you?

I always wanted to ask, What happens next? After they see you?

Once I stopped by to see Lucia on a Saturday, and she was weeding her flower beds without makeup. Not even foundation. I never saw my mother without makeup unless she was ready for bed.

Women in my family were afraid of everything.

An office lobby is a flat, cardboard kind of place, and an office lobby is all I had of Lucia at first. She changed for me when I saw her in her house. Like when you pull a Barbie out of her box, and for a while it’s enough to stare at her tiny shoes and the blue slivers of her eye shadow, but eventually she’s only a doll propped up on the carpet. But if you get her a Dreamhouse—and maybe a Corvette—then she has some substance. You can build her a whole life. You can sit back and watch her as she moves from room to room and turns on her record player and picks up the phone to make plans and solve problems. That was what Lucia’s house did. It let me move my imaginary Lucia around, room to room.

I added Bard, and he was another helpful piece. Was that how it was to be married? Because it wasn’t what I’d seen. They laughed. They talked like someone had written their lines for them, sharp and quick.

Where did the pile of dog towels go? Lucia would say.

In the washer, Bard would say.

In the washer with our towels? Where do you think the dog hair goes, Evan?

It gets washed, Lucia.

It gets washed right onto our towels! Do we really have to go over this again?

We don’t have to go over it again. It’s a washer. It washes.

They would go on like that forever. They argued about the longest street in Montgomery and whether you had to count only streets within the city limits or whether you could include Montgomery County. They argued over whether a wombat is a marsupial. They never argued about anything real.

Why can’t you just try harder? I heard Mom ask Dad once, toward the end. If you wanted to be happy, you’d be happy.

I don’t think I can be happy while I’m with you, he’d said, and I suppose that wasn’t exactly an argument, was it?

Once I got my license, I came by more often than Lucia knew. My only rule was that I couldn’t go by more than twice a week. She worked late a lot. Sometimes, when her car was gone, I barely slowed down. Other times I parked at the curb and went through the motions of knocking on the kitchen door. It was an excuse to look through the window. I could see the copper pots dangling from the hooks over the stove. I could see the spice rack. Her kitchen was nothing like ours—nothing of hers was like anything of ours. At home everything was too hard or too worn down, too clean or too grimy. Our couch and chairs were wooden armed, impossible for napping, and polish drenched every inch of wooden furniture. Once I had to set a piece of lemon cake on the coffee table for a second, and when I bit into it, the polish had soaked into it like sauce.

In Lucia’s house, everything made you want to touch it. The cranberry-colored carpet was soft under your feet. The chunk of driftwood felt like an ancient bone. The den lamps had silver leaves with dangling crystals, and when you set a drink on the end table, the crystals swayed. Lucia cut flowers from the yard and put them in vases. She had wine bottles in a pyramid. I’d never seen anyone drink a glass of wine other than on TV. (Did it involve a trip to the liquor store? Did she go by herself?)

Mom liked Elvis, but we only listened in the car. Oldies 106.9. Lucia played the blues, and she always lifted the arm of the record player with one finger. The records had names I’d never heard—Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker and Pinetop Perkins, and I tried to learn them but I never managed because how can you listen at the same time you’re talking?

The music sat in the air, more like a smell than a sound.

The books took up one whole wall, with shelves from the floor to the ceiling. We had bookshelves at home, but they were filled with bowls of potpourri and Mom’s endless figurines. Lucia gave me Alas, Babylon and Animal Farm and The Fountainhead. Before I met her, I mostly read Dad’s old paperbacks with their covers of cowboys and sunsets and sword-holding men and women wearing fur and daggers. Robert E. Howard—oh, I spent a lot of nights with Conan, wishing I could slip into his world, and I would be the fiercest kind of woman warrior, riding horses and slitting throats and eating roasted mammals that I’d killed with my own hands. Lucia’s books didn’t have massive thews or volcanic blue eyes, but I’d open the pages, knowing she had read the same words, and I’d swallow them whole at night—or they’d swallow me—and Mom was a universe away, watching reruns of Bewitched.

III.

After Sunday dinner at Aunt Molly’s, I pulled up by the curb at Lucia’s. Evan’s car was gone, and the house was dark. I was equal parts relieved and disappointed. I had suspected they didn’t go to church, but maybe they went somewhere with late services? Maybe they were having lunch in a fellowship hall somewhere or waiting for the check at Red Lobster?

I hoped they’d gone to church.

I knocked on the door anyway, standing in the carport with my forehead against the window, staring past the