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

asking her if she had the gun in her purse. I hate to think of you defenseless, he’d said, and he’d run a hand over her hair like he used to do to their Lhasa Apso. She liked being with her parents after a public event, when she was still, at least partially, the stage version of herself. That Lucia had endless patience and humor.

“I think they wanted to let as many people as possible participate,” she told him.

“Mission accomplished,” her father said. “Y’all up here on the left?”

“Yeah, we’re right there,” Evan said. “Where are you?”

“On the street,” Oliver said, pointing. “We thought they might charge in the lot.”

Lucia hoped her father would be safe driving back this late. He didn’t drive much at night anymore. Behind them a line of men and women in white shirts and black pants carried trays covered with foil and boxes loaded full of wine bottles. The caterers followed one another, antlike, emptying their arms into the back of a white van and then heading back inside for more.

“I thought the black woman who introduced you was very attractive,” said her mother, jingling her topaz tennis bracelet. “Don’t you think? And you looked so pretty up there, too. You know, I remember that there’s a rush to it. Being on stage.”

“When have you ever been on stage?” asked Lucia.

Her mother laughed her saloon girl’s laugh. Her lipstick had worn off, and she looked younger in the moonlight. “Fifth-grade spelling bee. I thought I’d wet my pants I was so scared. I made it to the final three, and when I walked off the stage, I tripped and landed with my face in Gabriel Anthony’s neck and he smelled like cheese. But after it was done, it was like all that nervousness came to a boil and turned kind of good. Is that what you feel like?”

“I feel the good part onstage, too,” Lucia said. “Not just after. You never told me you were in a spelling bee.”

“I liked spelling. And Gabriel Anthony, until I smelled him.” Her mother stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, reaching over to touch Lucia’s thumb. “You’ve got a burn there. Did you use aloe?”

“Did you?” Lucia asked, halting next to her.

Even in the dim light, she could see the fresh mark on her mother’s wrist. Likely another brush against the oven rack.

They were a family of reckless cooks.

Her grandmother would have enjoyed tonight. She’d have worried over her wardrobe, flat refused to go shopping, and ultimately would have felt deeply satisfied to get more wear out of one of her two party dresses: the ancient navy polka dot or the beaded lavender. They’d buried her in the lavender, and Lucia had worked equations as she gripped the metal casket. Her grandmother was born in 1892. Lucia’s own children, when she had them, should live past 2050; her grandchildren might live until 2100, and if she told them of tractors and milk cows and burned-off eyebrows and the flirting soldier who crushed a favorite hat on the train to Birmingham—if she got the stories right—then Ingrid Alma Bledsoe, a woman who never left the state of Alabama and never wore a pair of pants, would stay alive for more than two centuries.

Her mother was holding her burned wrist toward the light, trying to see it around the nasturtiums.

“I always kill the aloe,” she said.

“You don’t need to water it every day, Mother,” Lucia said. “You overwater.”

“Traffic’s cleared up some, don’t you think?” said Oliver behind them, shifting from loafer to loafer. “We’d better head on.”

“Let me take those, Caroline,” Evan said, reaching for the flower arrangement. “I’ll carry them to the car for you, and Oliver can get the door.”

Lucia watched as her mother handed over the arrangement. Even in the kind light, the illusion of youth didn’t hold. Caroline moved more slowly than she used to, and she was thicker around the waist. Underneath her topaz necklace, freckles covered her clavicles. Lucia remembered lying in her mother’s lap during a thousand sermons, her hair ribbon hanging against her mother’s stockings. She would pinch the ribbon between her fingers, a magnifying glass, and every peek through the loop captured some piece of her mother. Smooth, filed nails. Vaccination scar on her arm. The freckles across her throat, which Lucia had once been able to count. They were uncountable now. She had watched the dusting across her own throat darken and spread, and she knew they would cover her, too, one day.

“Essie and Matthew are headed this way,” said Evan, vase tucked in the crease of his elbow.

“I barely got to speak to them tonight,” Lucia said.

“I’ll go with your parents,” Evan said, shifting his grip on the arrangement. “You stay here and chat. I’ll meet you at the car.”

They exchanged a quick round of hugs, and Evan shepherded her parents away. Lucia watched the three of them head off at an angle—“up by the fire hydrant,” her father was saying, and she admired the width of her husband’s shoulders. Matthew and Essie Green stopped and congratulated her, and they had news of their son, who’d been accepted at Florida A&M. She saw how close the Greens stood to each other, no space between their arms, and she watched Essie straighten Matthew’s collar. Over their shoulders, she could still see Evan between her parents, his hand under her mother’s elbow as they stepped around a buckled bit of sidewalk.

In the beginning, she had kept track of how often he touched her like that. She’d noticed every single brush of his hand against her back, every linking of his fingers through hers.

After a while, the touches became uncountable. She felt him all the time.

She had talked to clients before about the ebb and flow of marriage, but she had never really believed in it. She had seen clients inching toward a court date, claws extended, and then both of them would magically realize that they were still deeply in love