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

heard anyone use it but her grandmother, who until the very end had kept an aloe plant by the sink, snapping a leaf for every scald and blister.

“Don’t get sentimental over the Jell-O,” she told her mother. “Granna didn’t even miss her leg. She’d be fine with you letting go of the vanilla.”

“Lu-cia,” said Caroline, laughing soft and low. “How was Chicago?”

“Good.”

“You flew?”

“I wouldn’t drive to Chicago, Mother.”

“How was the flight?”

This part of her life felt exotic to her mother, Lucia knew. Airplanes and hotels and taxis. She suspected that if she described each moment of the flight in detail—the stewardesses’ uniforms, the chicken salad, how the man next to her hogged the armrest—her mother would sit enthralled.

“Same as usual,” she said, knowing she should give her mother the chatter that she so obviously wanted.

“Did you order room service?” Caroline asked.

“I don’t think so. No. We ate out.”

“But you have, haven’t you?” Her mother gave her a sly look. “You’ve ordered room service before.”

“I have,” Lucia said. She opened the oven door again, deciding the dumplings were ready. “Are these apple?”

“Pear.”

“Last week I did them with chocolate and raspberries.”

“Chocolate?” Her mother reached for a wooden spoon without turning her head. She had a pink burn mark across her wrist, the seared imprint of the oven rack. “You went to school with Mavis’s nephew, actually.”

“Tom,” Lucia said slowly. “Tom?”

“Tom,” agreed Caroline. “That boy had a head full of mayonnaise. Remember when that baseball cap flew off his head when he was driving down the highway, and so he put the car in reverse and drove backward to get it?”

“Yeah,” said Lucia, laughing. “And the station wagon—it was a station wagon, right?—ran into him. Or he ran into it. I remember.”

There was a reason that they talked in the kitchen—dumplings and Jell-O salads filled the empty spaces. The past could do that, too. It was as if the two of them were standing far apart, separated by a huge bedsheet, a wide flat expanse. One old story would fold up the distance, bring them close, corner against corner.

“Tomato,” her mother reminded.

Lucia reached into the far-right drawer where the sharp knives stayed, and the lace curtains blew against her arm. Her mother had opened a window after all, and the familiarness of it washed over Lucia. She knew this place. She knew the cereal cabinet squeaked, making it dangerous to snitch Rice Krispies—which were kept not in a box but in a Tupperware cylinder—in the wee hours of the night. In the drawer under the toaster, you could find every possible variation of aluminum foil, Saran wrap, and sandwich bags. Bacon grease was collected in a Crisco tin by the sink. The view out every kitchen window was all leaves and branches. The curtains were tacky, but she loved how the hot air blew through the mesh screens and the green of the trees pulsed.

Most of the time she could barely remember the girl who had lived in this house, but there were moments—lace fluttering, wind smelling of honeysuckle and bacon and Barbecue Lay’s—there were moments where she was right under Lucia’s skin.

“I saw the piece in the paper,” her mother said. “I saved a copy.”

“About the counseling center?”

“The women who called had trouble with their husbands, I suppose? And you’d tell them if they should get a divorce?”

“I’d tell them what options they had,” Lucia said. “If they wanted to leave, I’d tell them how to do it smartly. Like to take the children with them because judges don’t like it when the mother leaves the children behind. That kind of thing.”

“Such a fuss,” her mother said.

Lucia finished peeling the tomato, focused on the narrow margin between peel and flesh. Her mother had, more than once, bought a dress she disliked because she didn’t want to hurt the saleswoman’s feelings. Her mother, asked by a teenage Lucia if it bothered her that women weren’t allowed to speak in their church, had said I don’t really care for public speaking. When that church had splintered a few years ago over the question of whether to let black people join, her father—despite his taste in jokes—came down on the right side of the issue and her mother would barely speak to him for weeks. It’s not worth all the hurt feelings, she’d said. Everyone mad at each other. Such a fuss.

“I spoke to one woman whose husband had broken her thumb,” Lucia said. “He bent it back until it snapped.”

“Gracious,” Caroline said, but Lucia got the feeling that she did not entirely believe it had happened. In her world, breaking a woman’s bones was not a thing a man did, and if a man did do it, it reflected poorly on the woman for being with him in the first place. Really it was best not to think about it.

Lucia slid the tomato neatly into the glass dish already two-thirds full of cucumber slices and chunks of Vidalia onion. She had seen this particular dish filled with these particular foods her entire life.

“Moxie’s gone,” she said.

“What?”

It was a relief to allow the thoughts in her head to match the words coming from her mouth. “Evan came home two days ago and she was gone,” she said. “We’ve driven around the neighborhood for hours.”

“She’ll turn up,” Caroline said cheerfully.

Unless she was dead in the road somewhere, Lucia thought. Unless she was hurt and bleeding. The dog did not have good odds when it came to the survival of the fittest. As the days passed, Lucia was finding it harder to push back these sorts of thoughts.

“Go on and tell the boys to come help their plates,” her mother said.

Lucia retrieved the men. They led the way as they all sidestepped along the counter, plates in hand, dipping into Pyrex and Corningware. Eventually they settled into their usual places with Oliver and Evan at the head and foot of the kitchen table. Their chairs squeaked against the linoleum as they pulled them out.

“I asked her about