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

Her speeches had slowed to a trickle, and he knew it. That first year out of law school she’d spoken to any group that would listen. Fifty-two speeches in a year. Cardboard boxes full of mimeographed letters asking Why is the Equal Rights Amendment important? and dining-room tables packed with women stuffing envelopes and paper cuts striping her knuckles.

Set up the mailing parties inside women’s homes, the organizer from the Women’s Political Caucus had said. If they stay home, their husbands won’t get their hackles up. There had been a long history of hackles. When the courts ruled in 1966 that women in Alabama were allowed to serve on juries, Lucia—still in college—had stared at the editorials warning that females were too delicate to handle lurid details, that they shouldn’t sleep in accommodations with strange men, and that, after all, wouldn’t they be abandoning their children at home with no one to mind them?

Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.

“Hell,” Evan was saying. “It hasn’t even been a month since they were snapping pictures of you talking about how the Fifth Circuit nominee list was rigged with white men.”

“You surely aren’t suggesting that the Democratic Party bashed my car.”

“I’m suggesting that you’ve said all sorts of things that bring out windshield bashers and urinators. When you give these speeches, they know where you are.”

He pulled out another album and then another, picking up speed, and she thought of those old-timey switchboard operators, jerking plugs in and out of slots, connecting and disconnecting. He had figured out long ago that if he stayed silent, she would talk. She knew that he had figured this out and yet it still worked.

“I am not canceling my speech tomorrow,” she said. “But I’ll make sure someone walks with me to my car.”

He didn’t gloat. He only held up a record.

“Pencil Thin Mustache?” she suggested, and he shook the record loose.

IV.

She’d had a string of late nights in the office, and now a dozen minor chores seemed to flash like dashboard lights as Lucia surveyed the house. The dishwasher was full of clean dishes. The doorknob on the closet was another twist or two from falling off. The dog-food bag was nearly empty, and the milk had expired two days ago, technically.

She’d nearly finished unloading the top rack of the dishwasher when someone knocked on the kitchen door. She flinched hard enough that she banged her hand against the edge of the counter.

“Damn it,” she hissed, hopping and flapping, and, in general, acting like a loon in the middle of her own kitchen.

Another knock, softer this time.

Evan was having dinner tonight with a new heart specialist at the hospital, but Lucia was not alone: Moxie came galloping down the hallway, taking the corner so fast she spun out and smacked her flank against the sofa. She hurled herself toward the door.

Lucia stared at her hand. She thought it might swell. It had been two weeks since the car incident, and still every little noise. She kept jumping at the sound of a drawer closing. She caught herself looking left, right, and then left again as she stepped into hallways, like some child who’d barely learned to cross the street. At night, she’d jolt awake when the wind shook the windowpanes. She hated the fear, always ready to break the surface. Break the skin. Bleed out of her.

This was not who she was.

She would not feel this.

A third knock at the door, so whoever it was had not been scared away by the dog. Moxie was on her hind legs, slavering, and if you didn’t know her, she would seem threatening. From her angle in the kitchen, Lucia could see nothing through the glass. Whoever it was had stepped out of view. It was still light outside.

Lucia glanced at the knife block. She pressed her face to one of the windowpanes in the door and glanced into the carport.

She caught a swathe of red hair and a bare arm with multicolored bracelets. Shoving Moxie back with one knee, she unlocked the door, and the moment she pushed it open the girl came forward, beaming at her.

“Rachel?” Lucia said.

“Hi,” said the girl, with a wave of her fingers. “I didn’t mean to bother you. I wasn’t positive it was you, and I just thought I’d see. But if it’s a bad time . . .”

“How in the world—?”

A satisfied look. A swish of ponytail.

“You said you lived near Bankhead,” the girl said. “So I was at my aunt’s after school, and I looked you up in the phone book. It turned out there aren’t too many Gilberts. There was no Bartholomew and no Evan, but then I saw the E. B., and I figured that must be him. So I walked.”

“You walked here? Did you tell someone you were coming?”

“Nah,” Rachel said. “Aunt Molly’s gone to Hancock’s for thread. We won’t eat supper until later. I had some time.”

Lucia realized she was staring over the girl’s shoulder, past the flat stretch of lawn, half expecting a car to come screeching into the driveway. Surely a girl this young could not just wander off without someone coming to look for her?

“You’re at a stranger’s house,” she said. “Won’t your mother or your aunt be worried that—?”

“You’re not a stranger,” said Rachel.

Lucia could not think of how to approach the potential impropriety of this. It seemed possible that the girl’s paper-doll mother—who had never followed up on their office meeting—might think that Lucia had invited Rachel, and that would seem extremely unprofessional. She should have thought about this possibility before she hinted at her address.

No—she should not have thought of it. There had been no reason to believe this girl would show up on her doorstep. And yet here Rachel was, one foot propped on the literal doorstep. Her hair was sweaty at her temples, and the damp patches made Lucia remember slicking back her own ponytail, the tree bark hot