Family Law by Gin Phillips (phonics reading books .txt) 📕

glimpse of something so big that I couldn’t make out its shape, and I’d have to turn away.

A squirrel circled his way up a pecan tree, claws scrabbling against bark. I breathed in the sweetness of flowers—camellia? Honeysuckle? The sun was warm on my face, and I let it soak in.

I took a right at a stop sign and tried to let the questions drain out of me. It was possible that I was confusing laziness with faith. On good nights, I could still close my eyes and feel God in the room with me as I prayed, and love would fill me like a balloon. In the moments between prayer and sleep I lost myself entirely, and I drifted up through the stars to him, floating away to a place I didn’t know or understand, and everything made sense.

I wanted that feeling of floating.

The squirrels bickered in the trees. A concrete fountain bubbled in someone’s front yard, and yellow roses curled around a fencepost. I stepped over a cracked handprint in the sidewalk, with a single yellow petal wedged into the thumb. There was nothing special about this street except that I’d never set foot on it. Now here I was wandering down the sidewalk alone, and not a single person had tried to stuff me in a van or tear off my clothes. All I’d seen were squirrels and petals and sun slashing through the leaves, and one day I’d be able to turn down any street I liked. I would take long walks and not know where I was going. I would roam for hours and get lost and find my way back, and—finally!—the thought of it was something like closing my eyes and drifting up to the stars.

A loud bark made me jump. The dog was just ahead of me, behind a chain-link fence that boxed off a wide backyard with a patio and tall grass. The dog bounded toward me, head as high as my shoulder, tongue hanging out, slobber spraying.

I knew her right away, but it took a little while for me to believe I was really seeing her.

“Moxie?” I said.

She sproinged, tail wagging her entire body. A couple of beagle-ish dogs came running up behind her, yapping, keeping their distance from me. I turned back to Moxie and saw her red collar with her silver tag jingling back and forth. I stretched out my hand toward her, and the beagles went nuts. I was trying to reason with them, scratching Moxie’s head at the same time, when a man with a beard slid open the patio door. I nearly called out to him because this sort of thing happened in our neighborhood sometimes, especially with the Martins’ cocker spaniel, who was always bolting out of their gate. Whoever found him would plop him into their backyard.

I’d always wondered why a dog as big as Moxie didn’t jump the fence. Maybe she’d finally done it, and this guy had found her. I could see a water bowl on the patio.

I stepped back, though, as the man slid the door closed behind him. I didn’t call out. No good reason why. I started walking like I was only strolling past. The man waved at me, and I waved back.

“Come on, Chewie,” he called.

It took me a second to realize that he was talking to Moxie. He’d given her a new name.

This man had stolen Lucia’s dog.

Lucia

I.

The drive to Andalusia took a little over an hour, and—in spite of herself—Lucia felt a rush of giddiness when she turned onto her old street: the Hoovers’ magnolia trees, which she’d climbed so often, tearing off seed pods and pretending they were grenades. The dead end where she’d learned to ride a bike, with the ear-shaped patch of rough asphalt that still called to her with the thunk-thunk of front and back wheel; the fig tree at the Colliers’ where she’d tossed pinched-off fig stems into the zoysia grass.

It was an illogical giddiness, like waking up and seeing snow out the windows—no school!—before remembering that she had to work regardless. She saw her parents at least once a month. This was no great homecoming. This was not even home.

Mr. Dorian’s VW Rabbit, freshly waxed in the driveway.

Bright blue shutters on a chalk-white house. She’d seen skinny little Harold Stinton in that yard a hundred times, pestering someone to toss a grape, and he’d catch it in his mouth, braces flashing. His cargo plane had been shot down in Khe Sanh, and Lucia’s mother had whispered the word “fireball.”

Julie Bartlett, two years older than Lucia, was watering the begonias in front of the house where she’d grown up. If Lucia floated above the trees, she could point to the homes of a dozen girls who’d gone to school with her, who were all still here, more or less. Maybe a few miles away in Opp or Enterprise or Brewton.

Evan pulled into the driveway, holly branches scraping against the car as he parked by the side door. He got out and retucked his dress shirt: they always dressed for her parents as if they’d been at church that morning. Lucia was standing and straightening her belt when her mother pushed open the storm door, makeup fresh and hair well tended, bracelets and necklace coordinated, bare toes curled around the top step.

“Was the traffic bad?” Caroline asked. Her first question always involved traffic.

Lucia kissed her cheek.

“Not bad at all,” she answered. Her mother smelled of Oil of Olay and White Rain hair spray, and Lucia inhaled.

“Not a single log truck,” Evan said, which earned him a jab in his side from Caroline.

Her mother’s obsession with log trucks had grated on Lucia for years—every time she got in a car, her mother issued some sort of log truck advisory. Lucia had long congratulated herself on muffling her annoyance, No, Mother, I was not behind any log trucks, and if there was condescension