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

room service,” Caroline said, still standing. She reached for the tea pitcher and topped off her husband’s glass. Lucia had never seen her father pour her mother a glass of anything.

“She’s ordered it, hasn’t she?” said her father.

“I made him a bet, Lucia,” Caroline said.

Evan unfolded his paper napkin. “You people know how to have fun.”

“What’s the big deal about room service?” asked Lucia. “It’s a business expense.”

Her parents laughed.

“A business expense,” mimicked her father, not unkindly. Proudly even, as if she had suddenly spoken a sentence in French.

Caroline sat, finally. She folded her hands.

“Shall we pray, everyone?” Oliver said. “Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this food, this day, and all your many blessings—”

You did it yourself, Lucia thought, behind her closed eyes.

She knew that beneath their sunny affection, her parents felt that she had gone off to college and come back a stranger. It wasn’t true. In first grade, the teachers had laid out a box of multicolored reading sheets. You started at pink and worked your way to black. She got to black before anyone else was even past purple. Her parents had expected straight As, and she’d delivered. They told her she could do anything. She won trophies and ribbons and plaques.

Did they expect that her wiring would short-circuit when she got her high school diploma, all the momentum leeched out of her? That she would step into the real world and want nothing more than to find a man and have children and scour the mall for pretty dresses and hand towels?

They taught her to think and they taught her to want. She was exactly who they had made her to be.

“Everything looks delicious, Mother,” she said, as she opened her eyes.

II.

Lucia peeled off the paper that was taped to her door, noticing that it was actually a receipt from Spencer’s Gifts. Call me at Molly’s, the note said, followed by Rachel’s signature and a phone number.

The phone call did not take long. Lucia shouted down the hallway to Evan that Rachel had spotted Moxie and that she would be back in a minute with the dog. Then she was stepping out the not-quite-closed door, still in her striped dress and wedge sandals. Moxie. Filthy snout and big wet tongue and wiggling, crushing weight on your lap, and she had missed the dumb dog so much. She was pacing up and down the driveway when Rachel pulled up to the curb. She shifted into park a little too quickly, her feet hitting the pavement while the car was still rocking. She slammed the door, then yanked at the handle a couple of times before heading toward Lucia at a trot, pastel-flowered dress flapping.

Lucia hugged her. “I’ve been so worried. Did she look all right? Did you talk to the people who have her?”

They were already moving, turning onto the sidewalk.

“She looked fine,” said Rachel. “Her normal self. But the guy was calling her Chewie. Isn’t that strange? She still has her red collar and tag around her neck, so why hasn’t he called you?”

Lucia stopped. With a little prompting, she got a more thorough account of what Rachel had seen and heard, and her relief shifted into something darker. Had the man stolen Moxie right out of the yard?

“I don’t think you should come with me,” she said.

“I have to show you the house.” Rachel headed off at full speed, as if she could outrun an argument.

Maybe she could, because Lucia fell into step. Her anger was overpowering anything else. He had stolen her dog. A dog as trusting as any animal could be, not an iota of self-preservation in her. If this fool of a man thought that she wouldn’t rip him apart to get Moxie back, he was mistaken.

She crushed a pinecone underfoot.

“We take a right up here,” Rachel said. “It’s on that street.”

“Thomas Street.”

“I guess,” said Rachel. “Hey, I saw that story about you in the paper.”

Lucia looked over. The girl was a fast walker, thank goodness, not a stroller. And did everyone in the entire city read the Alabama Journal?

“They think you’re a ‘pretty little blonde,’” Rachel added. She seemed to believe the phrasing was flattering.

“That is what they wrote,” Lucia said.

“And you’re a feminist.”

“I am.”

“Why,” said Rachel, “would you kidnap a dog that lives a couple of blocks away?”

Lucia abandoned thoughts of discussing women’s equality.

“Because you’re not that bright,” she said, but that was likely not the whole of it. She thought back to her vandalized car years ago, and she thought of the occasional nastiness she got in the mail. It was possible that she had represented this man’s wife or ex-wife, or maybe she had refused to represent him. It was possible that he was a nutcase who believed women should be obedient and homebound. It was possible that this was some elaborate attempt to meet her. Pretty little blonde. This option would not have occurred to her before Judge Musgrove told her—in open court a few years back—that he would have dismissed any case just for the opportunity to sit and watch her sweet ass walk out the door. Before Garrison Langley had admitted that he’d offered her that short-lived partnership because he’d hoped that she’d sleep with him. Amenable, he’d said. I hoped you’d be amenable. He’d had a couple of martinis, but no question he was telling the truth.

Sometimes she wondered at her sex appeal. Maybe it was the strangeness of her—a woman lawyer—that drew them in. Like a woman with three breasts. Bizarre but intriguing.

If this man had stolen her dog hoping to sleep with her, it was a stupider plan than offering her a partnership.

When they pulled even with the chain-link fence, Rachel pointed to where she’d seen Moxie, but there was no sign of the dog. They turned the corner to the front of the house, and the yard was all shadows and dirt. The roots of a huge pecan tree spread out in winding spokes, and