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

III.

A few weeks after she’d retrieved Moxie, Lucia was checking the mail when she saw Marlon walking up her driveway. The beagles were at his feet, silent and perfectly in sync. She wondered how he managed it.

“Hey there,” he said.

He wore denim shorts and a faded T-shirt with enough holes that she thought moths might have been involved. He held a banana, half eaten, in the hand that wasn’t filled with dog leashes.

“I’d wanted to say something to you,” he said. “First of all, I’m sorry.”

“For taking my dog?”

“Well, now, I didn’t take her. She was out already, and I let her in. But I did keep her. I admit that. You’re not around much, you know? She barks. She barks all day long, and I can hear her from the sidewalk.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Lucia.

He took a bite of the banana. The beagles stood there.

“I thought I’d take her in,” he said. “I thought maybe it would give you an easy out. Some people don’t really want their dog. I didn’t know if you’d come looking. I only wanted to make sure you were good to her.”

Lucia nodded, wondering. Was she good to Moxie? Was it wrong to leave a dog at home for nine or ten hours by herself? She felt a rush of guilt, but she’d learned that guilt came too quickly: it needed parsing. Why should only her long hours matter? Evan was gone, too. And wasn’t solitude the lot of most dogs? When she was growing up, hadn’t she left Barnie—round black face, moplike body—for the entire school day? Her mother had been there in the house, but her mother hardly spoke to Barnie. Did it count so much just to have a human moving through the rooms, banging pots and pans occasionally?

“Anyway, I apologize,” Marlon said. “I know you love your dog.”

Lucia wished that she did not feel a rush of pleasure at that. She wished she didn’t care what anyone thought of her or her dog. She watched as Marlon folded up his banana peel, one handed, and tucked it into his pocket.

“So you’re a lawyer, I hear?”

“I am,” she said.

He rolled a small black shape—some part of the banana stem?—between his fingertips.

“How come?” he asked.

“I had a roommate who was going to medical school,” she said, wondering how long the beagles could stay frozen. “We were competitive.”

It was the truest answer she had. It did not make for a satisfying narrative arc, but it was accurate. She’d coordinated her law school interview with her roommate’s visit to Vanderbilt, and then she’d sat across from the dean of the law school and he thanked her for coming and asked her why she was worth taking a slot away from a man. Her fingers had gone slightly numb as she yammered out an answer, unsure how to justify herself. It was the first time she understood that her gender needed to be offset. Neutralized. Later she wondered if the question was supposed to test her ability to argue persuasively while stunned and hurt, but if so, surely she would have heard of men being asked some similarly insulting question. Although what could they be asked that would compare? At any rate, when she visited Cumberland Law School, the dean didn’t ask her that. He looked at her LSAT scores, and he told her if she’d come there, she’d be the queen of the law school. She made her decision before she even climbed back into her dinged-up Cutlass.

When she started classes, she had to look up the definition of “plaintiff” and “defendant.”

Marlon kept rubbing the banana remnant between his fingers. “You like divorce cases, I guess?”

“I seem to be good at them,” she said.

She did not especially like divorce cases. Back in those first years, if someone handed you a case, you didn’t ask what kind it was. Torts, contracts, civil liberties, a little bit of criminal—she had done them all, and this was where she had ended up. She had taken a series of steps, each one logical, and they had taken her to family law, without her ever aiming for it. The truth was that when she thought of what she loved about law, she thought of sitting in the White Tortoise, that old head shop downtown, the walls full of bongs. She’d been on retainer with the ACLU, and they wanted to challenge the state’s new paraphernalia law.

She’d reached out to a dozen law enforcement agents, telling them that they were invited to their first-ever deposition in a head shop. Once they got there, she sat them down at one long table, where she’d spread her props: a bong, a glass pipe, a Coke can, an empty toilet paper roll, a razor blade, a mirror, that plastic spoon from McDonald’s that was good for cocaine snorting. A few other bits and pieces.

She’d neatly labeled each item, and then she’d gone through the list with each deputy, one by one. Is this paraphernalia? And this? Out of those ten deputies, not two of them had the same answers. She knew before she left the shop that the law would be overturned. She could almost hear a clicking, like the turning of a Rubik’s Cube, bright squares sliding into place. That was what it felt like when you found the answer—where there’d been a jumble of colors, you started to see a pattern. You began shifting the pieces into place. That was what she loved: the moment three or four moves before the case was won—the moment when she saw it coming.

“Do you hire detectives?” Marlon asked.

“No,” she said. “I do not.”

“Because this is the second thing I wanted to say. There’s a car that comes by your house.”

That struck Lucia as funny. “Why are you casing my house, Marlon?”

“I’m dead serious,” he said. “When I’m out with the dogs, I see a Black Buick pull up and sit there. I’ve seen it three or