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

don’t normally look too close at a toilet—not at the creases where the metal bolts fasten to the concrete, not at the curve of the bowl, inside and out. No matter how I tried to keep my eyes unfocused, I couldn’t help but see the spattered stains. Dark blotches. Hairs, swirled and dried. A bloody tampon tossed on the cement. My hand was only a wad of paper towels away from all of it. My hair, even in a ponytail, kept falling forward. I had a sense that this was not me. I wasn’t someone who cleaned public toilets. I wasn’t someone who needed to wash my hands three times to make sure I wasn’t contaminated with a stranger’s diarrhea.

I stepped back outside the bathroom, nose full of chemicals, and Luther was waiting there, wiping his hands on his jeans like he hadn’t bothered with a paper towel. I was almost glad to see him. He could give me instructions, and I could follow them, and that didn’t require any thinking, and we’d go along like that and then the day would be over.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked.

I did not want to be offensive.

“Go on,” he said. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“Forty-five,” I said, thinking surely he was nearly sixty.

“Shit,” he said. “Excuse me. I’m thirty-six.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Ain’t your fault,” he said. “I know how I am. You see this?”

He yanked up his T-shirt sleeve and pointed to a white jagged line of a scar on his bicep. I nodded.

“Bullet,” he said. He held out his hand, and I handed him my cleaning bottles. His sleeve stayed hitched up, showing the bottom inch of his scar. He set the bottles, one at a time, back into the open closet, and then he closed and locked the door.

“I’ve been through it,” he said, turning back to me. “I’ve been shot, stabbed, cut with a bottle, run over, and pushed off a building.”

Even though I wished he would keep his distance so that his elbow wouldn’t keep touching mine, I couldn’t help being curious as we walked back into the open air, trees spreading over us. The day was warming up, and I felt the first sheen of sweat on my face.

“Nearly died from a car wreck, too,” he said.

“The one where you got run over?”

“No, that was being run over. The wreck was when I ran my car into a telephone pole. That was before they took my license. And then they give you community service eight or nine miles from your place, and they know you have to walk, so what does that tell you?”

“You walked here?”

“No choice.”

We cut through a wide field, bordered by oaks, as much dirt as grass. Old acorns covered the ground, and they disintegrated with every step. Eventually we reached another pavilion, this one in view of the playground. A few kids were swinging, and a mom was sitting on a bench, reading a People magazine. The sight of them settled me. As we scrubbed the tables, Luther kept up a steady patter, telling me about dogs he’d owned and how he liked his hamburgers cooked and how good the fishing was at Lake Martin. He asked me questions about where I went to school and if I had brothers and sisters and if I had a boyfriend. I kept my answers short.

“You like camping?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said. “My dad took me once.”

“He doesn’t take you anymore?”

“He travels a lot,” I said.

He nodded. “My dad didn’t do much neither.”

Even though I had my eyes on my broom, I could hear the sympathy or pity or whatever it was in Luther’s voice. I didn’t bother correcting him. I didn’t see my dad often, but when I did, we talked books and movies, and he told me about his job and I told him about school and he listened. He always listened. It wasn’t a bad thing that he had a life outside of Montgomery: it was a gift. Dad didn’t require a single thing from me. I never had to worry about him. He enjoyed me, but he didn’t need me, and that was what I loved most about him.

“I know this place up on Smith Lake,” Luther was saying. “Perfect place. I could take you. Your dad, too. Nothing untoward. We’d have a nice time.”

He’d stepped closer to me, and I stopped sweeping.

I could smell him. I could see a fleck of maybe pepper wedged in his gums as he smiled.

I thought of a conversation between Mom and Aunt Molly after Aunt Molly had let the yardman—a white yardman, granted—come in and use the restroom, and both of them were wondering whether that had been smart, whether it was all right to let that kind of man into your house, even when that same man had cut your grass for seven years, because you never knew, did you? I could picture Mom pressing her lips together at Luther, even though he had done nothing more than lose a tooth—and a driver’s license—and try to make conversation.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ll tell him I asked?”

“Sure,” I said.

Two more hours, steadily working. A little past noon we each got a pack of crackers from the vending machine and sat on a bench—a solid two feet between us—eating them. I drained a Fanta. The breeze turned the day from hot to pleasant.

“So what did you do to get all this community service?” I asked. “I know it wasn’t littering.”

He folded up his empty cracker wrapper, creasing it carefully. Lance Toast Chee Peanut Butter, it read, and I’d never noticed that the cracker people didn’t use the word “cheese.”

“It wasn’t what I did,” he said. “It was what they said I did.”

“Okay,” I said. “What did they say you did?”

“They said I raped my sixteen-year-old niece. Or sexually assaulted her or some bullcrap.”

He kept folding that piece of plastic. Chee Chee Chee.

“But you didn’t?” I said.

“Nah. She just told them she’d said no.”

He stood, taking