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

weird, but he didn’t notice that, either.

He stepped into the grass, and I realized the cords he was holding were Christmas lights, long knotted strands of them.

“I’m going to light the pool,” he said. “These things sit around in the basement all year long, and I’m going to make use of them.”

I stepped into his yard, bits of shell and nut and root cutting into my feet. The shade was denser close to the trunk of the pecan tree.

“You’re going to put lights in the pool?” I said.

“Not in it,” he said. “Around it. Now I’m wondering about your science curriculum. You know the earth isn’t flat, right? And women weren’t created from a rib bone?”

“My curriculum is fine,” I said. “I know you can’t put lights in a pool. I just wasn’t sure that you did.”

He tilted his head. Now, of course, he chose to be observant.

“You got a look on your face there,” he said. “I’m confident you don’t believe the earth is flat. Do you believe in Adam and Eve? The whole earth-in-seven-days notion?”

“I—I believe in the Bible, if that’s what you mean.”

“I apologize,” he said, and his voice had turned gentle. It didn’t suit him. “I shouldn’t have said that. There are multiple ways to read the Bible, and you seemed like you were—well, it just didn’t occur to me that you believed it was literal. Which is absolutely fine.”

Standing there facing him, I couldn’t sort through my thoughts. I understood, of course, that plenty of people did not believe in the Bible, but he was implying something other than lack of belief.

“You don’t believe it’s literal?” I said.

“No.”

“You don’t believe it’s true?”

“That’s not quite the same thing. I don’t read it as a collection of facts.”

“How do you read it?”

He rolled his shoulders. He played with a loose loop of cord.

“As a collection of stories,” he said after a few seconds, leaving a pause between each word. “Powerful stories that might be based on real people and real events. Stories you can interpret as you like. You can find wisdom in them, but I don’t believe they actually happened.”

I had no frame of reference for what he was saying. This was not a debate about wine versus grape juice. This was unfathomable. “You don’t believe it happened like it’s written?”

His voice stayed obnoxiously gentle. “I don’t.”

It was an absurd conversation to be having standing in the front yard, cars rumbling past. My hands were stuffed with mail and his hands were stuffed with lights, and we both had things to do.

“I’ve never once seen you in your pool,” I said. “Can you even swim?”

His eyebrows jerked. “Can I swim?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, I can swim. Of course I can swim. I’m a grown man.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“I’m definitely grown. And a man.”

“My mother is grown, and she can’t swim,” I said. “Adults do not all know how to swim.”

“Well, this one does.”

“I still don’t believe you,” I said, picking up steam. “No one is ever in that pool.”

He looked at me and I could see his gears turning. He was in a patch of sun, and I’d never noticed that his eyes were blue.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s fix that. The weather’s getting warm enough—come over and swim tonight. Bring your mom.”

“My mom doesn’t like the water,” I said.

He snaked his wrist through the tangle of lights until they were looped over his elbow. With his free hand he picked at one strand, loosening the knots slightly.

“Then come over by yourself,” he said.

“Tonight?”

He nodded. “I’ll prove that I know how to swim.”

Eventually—very soon, actually—I would look back at this moment and try to decipher myself. While I wasn’t deaf to the voice that whispered Be careful, I thought it was my mother’s voice. I was still flush with the confidence of earrings, and that voice did not make the idea less appealing.

He was my neighbor. I had once spent three consecutive Thursdays—at Mom’s insistence—trying to learn knitting from Mrs. Hightower down the street, and I had carried casseroles to plenty of other neighbors and navigated the hallways of their houses by myself. I would be swimming right next to my own backyard, even though this was technically a man inviting me to spend time with him alone. No, it was not even that. He had invited my mother, too.

He was my neighbor.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, jarring loose one loop of lights so that it fell to his knees. “Come over after dinner. I’ll be here. And now I have some lights to hang.”

He nodded at me, squinting in the sun so that the blue of his eyes completely vanished. In two fast steps, he’d disappeared back inside his house, and I wondered why he’d come outside in the first place when the pool was in the backyard.

I made my way back up the driveway, picking a handful of spider lilies on my way. By the time Mom came home, I’d put them in a plastic Hamburglar cup in the middle of the kitchen table, and I was labeling a map of World War II battle sites for U.S. History class.

“I like the lilies,” Mom said, shrugging out of her sweater and untucking her tank top. “We have a vase somewhere.”

“We do? Where?”

“Well, that’s a good question. Maybe in the garage.”

She reached for my ice water and took a long swallow. The neck of her blouse was damp.

“I think I’ll just leave them in the cup,” I said. “I ran into Mr. Cleary when I was getting the mail—it’s in the rocking chair—and he told me we could use his pool. Which would be cool.”

“Really? When?”

“Tonight,” I said. “He’s got his son for the night, and they’re going out to ShowBiz or somewhere for dinner, and they won’t be back until later. He said you and I could come enjoy the pool—weird, huh, that it finally occurred to him to offer after all this time?”

Once I had been surprised by how easy it was to lie. Now