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

Lucia stepped sideways, poking at the hostas planted under the front window. The leaves were flattened, and she wondered if Evan had accidentally stood on them when he mowed the yard.

“Rachel drives an old Buick,” she said.

“It’s not the girl,” he said.

Lucia wondered how many times a day Marlon walked his dogs, and she wondered how many of those times took him past her house.

“Who else would it be?” she asked.

“That’s my point.”

She was not positive that this man was completely sane, but she was starting to like him. Her mother might do the same thing: construct private eyes or hit men out of lost deliverymen.

“Well, Marlon,” she said, “if they want me, I imagine they’ll come to the door.”

IV.

Saturday afternoon, her hand on the hard line of his jaw, bone and skin and bristle. His knees clamping her hip bones as she leaned forward, her hair falling around his face. Juicy Fruit on his breath. His hands on her waist, fingertips biting, as he flipped her to her back.

The flat of his tongue on her collarbone. His sweat dripping onto her throat.

Moxie, barking from the hallway, furious, as if mujahideen were storming the house, gory death imminent.

“She’s been hallucinating strangers at the front door,” Evan said, pausing above her. “She’s determined someone is out there.”

Her hands sliding over his shoulder blades. “More,” she said.

He moved against her. His teeth clamped onto her upper arm, fastening only for a moment.

Her hands in his damp hair.

“Anytime,” he said.

V.

As she did every morning when she got to the office, Lucia picked up the mail from the basket where Marissa weeded and sorted it. Her various reflections went through the same motions along the lobby walls. She carried the stack down the hallway, bumping her office door open with her hip.

At her desk, she ran a finger under the flap of the envelope with the Jackson & Price return address, fairly sure it was Paul Price trying to set up a meeting about the Woodruffs. She scanned it—As you likely know, my client and yours recently discussed the details of their divorce. If you’d like to meet . . .

The next letter was a request to cohost a fund-raiser for George McMillan, which she would obviously do because she liked the man and also, Lord, if George Wallace won the governor’s nomination—it didn’t bear considering. She opened the third envelope. The lack of a return address should have made her cautious, but it had been months since she’d had one of these. Dear Lucia Gilbert, it started quite professionally. I hope one day you understand the damage you’ve done, how you ruin things and people. You reap what you sow, that’s the truth. I look forward to you rotting in hell sooner not later. Even if you get on your knees and pray and I bet that’s not what you do on your knees, you will burn and scream and you’ll deserve it.

It was typed and unsigned. She ripped it in half and tossed it in the trash can. Once upon a time she wondered who would go to the trouble of typing and mailing such a letter, but now she didn’t wonder about any part of it.

Her thoughts drifted instead to Bequeatha Long, a girl from her family court days who had been taken from her addict mother and placed with an aunt. Out of view of the courts, the aunt kicked Bequeatha out of the house when she was thirteen. There were only so many ways for a girl to earn money, and by the time the courts rediscovered the child, she was fifteen years old with one prostitution charge and a thirty-eight-year-old boyfriend. That boyfriend shot the assistant manager at an Exxon station and stuffed the body in the trunk of his car. Bequeatha—such a doll-like face—had been waiting in the car during the robbery; at her own arraignment, her eye had been swollen shut. The boyfriend had punched her not long before the robbery, and she’d driven the car like he told her. What was she supposed to do—let him kill her, too? She was poor and she was black, and they tried her as an adult and sent her to prison for twenty years.

You reap what you sow, the judge had said to her, his gold tooth flashing, and Lucia had imagined ripping it out with needle-nose pliers.

Let that be a lesson to anyone who said men and women weren’t treated equally. People might scoff at the idea of a woman astronaut or Supreme Court justice, but when it came to punishing that girl just as harshly as a grown man—well, justice had been completely blind.

No one ever mentioned that sometimes you reaped what other people sowed.

“Here you go,” said Marissa, inches away, holding out a cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” Lucia said.

“Gladys Plexico just called again about her late parents’ house—”

“I meant to get back to her yesterday,” Lucia said. “Call and tell her she’s free to put the house on the market. The court eliminated that restriction on married women four years ago—she doesn’t need her husband’s signature anymore to sell her own property. No need to wait until the divorce is final.”

Marissa gave the trash can a light kick. “So what did the letter say?”

Lucia remembered her first firm, where the secretary had plopped herself on the edge of her desk and announced, “Just so you know, I don’t work for women.” And yet she’d managed to find Marissa, who knew her well enough by now to interpret her paper ripping.

“Rot in hell,” Lucia said. “In summary.”

“No signature?”

“Why do you still ask that?”

Marissa pushed her dark curls out of her face. “You should have to sign a letter like that. You should have to put your name and phone number at the end, in case someone would like to continue the discussion.”

“I don’t want to continue the discussion,” Lucia said.

“You’re telling me that if that