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

three slow steps to the trash can. He said more, but I faded in and out. He and his brother didn’t get along, and his brother was always looking for an excuse to get back at him. And the girl, well, he wasn’t nearly the first—

When he finally faced me, he held a hand over his eyes, blocking the sun.

“You scared of me now?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“’Cause you’re easing away from me,” he said. “I ain’t gonna do nothing to you. I don’t do that sort of thing. You hear me?”

“I know,” I said. “I know you’re not.”

I made myself walk to the trash can and stand next to him as I threw my wrapper away. I watched it fall into a paper cup full of soft drink and rainwater and dead gnats.

I smiled at Luther, reassuring him. I wondered how to find the security guard’s shack. I’d gotten turned around, not paying attention, and now, obviously, I needed to get out. I needed to tell the guard that I was squeezing into closets with a rapist, and someone needed to drive me home.

“Ready?” said Luther.

“Ready,” I said, and we walked on to the next bathroom. When we got there, I pulled one paper towel after another from the dispenser, and they filled my fist until they looked like a dead flower, brown petals blooming.

It was another hour before we passed the security guard’s office, a small wooden building with a single window. I needed to make up an excuse to talk to him privately, I thought. It wasn’t that I was afraid that Luther would stop me—I could scream at any point, I’d told myself several times. He had not threatened me or propositioned me, and he had been very subdued since he told his story. Now that I had pushed through the first wave of panic, now that the words—rape, rape, niece, niece—had stopped playing through my head, I wondered if I might be overreacting.

But I wanted to explain everything to the security guard. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t feel like I was myself.

I told Luther that I needed to fix my hair, and I made a big show of leaning over and rearranging my ponytail, and he said he’d meet me at the bathrooms. When he’d trudged out of sight, I knocked on the guard’s door. The old man opened it quickly and—miracle of miracles—smiled at me.

“Hot day, huh?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You can call me Maxwell,” he said. “You want to come in and have a coke and cool off?”

It was as if he had just remembered that I was a teenager who drove a little too fast, not some hardened criminal. Or maybe he’d been trying to scare me in the beginning. Maybe that was the way it worked—try to scare the teenagers enough so they’d never speed again, and if you threw in a rapist, well, all the better.

I told him that I would like a drink. His office was air-conditioned, icy, and the sweat on my face evaporated as I stepped through the doorway. The room held a desk, two chairs, and a small refrigerator. The walls were empty except for a cheap plastic clock and a shellacked fish on a plaque. Maxwell opened the refrigerator, and it had drinks stuffed from top to bottom, including a few beers. I asked for a Dr Pepper, and when he handed it to me, I noticed that instead of a wedding ring, he wore a class ring, dark gold and ruby-stoned.

He waved me toward the chair that wasn’t behind the desk. I’d taken my second sip when someone banged on the door.

“Hello,” called Luther. “Hello, sir?”

Maxwell went to the door, opening it only a crack. “Yeah?”

“She in there?” said Luther, clearly not remembering my name. “I was wondering where she went.”

“She’s in here,” said Maxwell, his voice not warm. Like a different man than the one who had offered me a soft drink, and this park was a different world entirely, some Twilight Zone kind of set. No one seemed real.

“Can I come in?” Luther asked. He peered around the door, half his head appearing over Maxwell’s shoulder.

I smiled at him and wondered why I did it.

“No,” said Maxwell, a hand on his thick brown belt. “She’ll be on in a minute.”

He closed the door.

I held the Dr Pepper can against my forehead, and it felt beautiful. I had an immense affection for Maxwell all of a sudden, who finally seemed like what I expected from an old man.

“He okay?” Maxwell asked, easing himself into the chair behind his desk. “He bothering you at all?”

“He’s fine,” I said, trying to think through the question. Was it possible that Maxwell knew about the niece? Had I been right earlier—did they—whoever “they” were—like to use rapists as a deterrent to speeding?

“You don’t sound so sure,” he said.

“He says he’s here for raping his sixteen-year-old niece,” I said.

Maxwell pushed back in his reclining chair, staring down at the floor with his chin tucked against his throat. “He said that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He told you that? That exact thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well.” He pushed a drawer closed with his knee. “But he hasn’t done anything to you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well. You come on in here anytime you get too hot, okay? It’s hard work for a young thing out there on a day like today, and you don’t want to overdo. I got plenty of Coca-Colas.”

He stood.

I stood, too.

“Thank you,” I said, and I opened the door and walked back into the heat, and, no, none of it was real. Luther was waiting. I let him lead me to the next bathroom and the next and the next, and he asked me if my mother could give him a ride when she came to pick me up, and I said that ever since she’d been made manager at the ballet store, she was bone tired at the end of the day and surely would want to go straight home.

When Mom got