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

do or act like you do. You remember this. You don’t ever know what people come home to. She’d watched through that same car window as he changed a cavalcade of flat tires: he was incapable of driving past any woman, black or white, stranded on the side of the road. He’d taught her to stop and help strangers.

He’d taught her that Mexicans would cheat you if they could. He’d taught her that a husband was the head of his wife just as Christ was the head of the church. And so what was she supposed to do with all of it, looking at him now scanning her cabinets for some loose knob he could tighten?

“It has nothing to do with the neighborhood, Oliver,” said Evan, falling onto the sofa. “It wasn’t random. Tell him who you think it was, Lucia.”

“I have no idea,” she said, puzzled. “It could have been random.”

“Really?” Evan said. “No idea at all?”

She understood then. He was desperate enough that he was willing to bring her parents into this. She had refused to hypothesize, and now he was hoping to have numbers on his side.

“Really,” she said. “I have no idea.”

She did not really believe that the shooting was random, but why burden her parents with that detail? She’d tried to convince Evan: there was no solving this. So many names and so many faces. These past few nights, lying awake, she’d assessed every person she’d encountered in the past week. The past month. Surely she averaged a dozen new people a week, and that was if she hadn’t done any public speaking. If she stretched back further through the years, back to the would-he-kill-me? days, she might have met hundreds a month. Those names and faces were gone, most of them, wiped clean from her mind.

But she didn’t have to delve that far back. Divorce drove people crazy. When your family fell apart, it stripped you down to your most primal self, which was why divorce lawyers tended to get assaulted more than, say, estate attorneys or intellectual property guys. How many people might hate her? Maybe none. Maybe a thousand. There was no keeping track. If she tried—if she pictured a maniac behind every face she passed on the sidewalk or smiled at from behind her desk—she’d never make it through the day.

“You think you know the person?” her father asked her. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him. He propped an elbow on the counter, nearly mirroring her mother’s pose.

“Won’t y’all please sit down?” Lucia said to them both.

“We’re fine,” said Caroline. “Do you? Do you think you know whoever did it?”

Lucia stepped backward until she felt the wall. She pushed against it, easing the ache in her shoulders.

“There’s no telling,” she said. “It could be anyone I’ve ever met over the past decade or more or it could be someone I’ve never met. It’s pointless to start going down that road. The police will see what they can find out. That’s their job.”

“What about that fellow who ran the bulldozer into his wife’s bedroom?” her father asked.

That case had been in the papers. The photos had been compelling.

“It wasn’t a bulldozer,” Lucia said. “It was a backhoe. And the wife’s sister had some internal injuries, so he got sentenced to five years. It’s not him.”

Her father rested his chin on his hand. She could feel him warming to the topic. Her mother was scraping away with one fingernail at something on the countertop.

“You’ve had nut jobs,” Oliver said. “You don’t talk about them, but we know you’ve had nut jobs.”

Lucia was not, legally speaking, allowed to talk about the nut jobs. She’d never mentioned the man whose wife had found him tied up with extension cords, with their real estate agent naked on top of him, rubbing his chest with a Brillo pad. She hadn’t told them about the woman who emptied her children’s college savings account. She hadn’t told them about the man who executed his son’s gerbil or the grandmother who set her daughter-in-law’s car on fire. All of those stories involved their own ugliness, but it was assessable. It was contained inside a single house and limited to a couple of people, maybe a handful, if you counted children and grandmothers and real estate agents. In court, there could be a reckoning, and she could be part of it.

Some things did not have a reckoning, and waiting for one would drive you crazy.

“What about the black man who killed that woman at Sears?” her mother said.

“That man’s in prison, Mother,” Lucia answered. “When you kill people, you wind up in prison. Can we please stop doing this?”

“You’ve overdone yourself,” Caroline said. “You’ve just overdone yourself.”

Lucia watched as her mother toed off her shoes, nudging them against the wall, toe to toe and heel to heel. She needed things in their appropriate place. Shoes and dishes and cereal in Tupperware and men and women and black and white, and she believed that if you never veered outside the lines, nothing bad could happen to you. Like a lasso laid on the ground, warding off the snakes. And if something terrible did happen, that surely meant you had stepped over a line.

Lucia picked up the gun, letting it rest in her hand. Hollywood made up that story about lassos. Westerns were full of nonsense. Snakes could go anywhere they wanted.

“Thank you, Dad,” she said. “I’m not sure I want this, but—”

“Why wouldn’t you want it?” asked her father.

“I don’t know. A gun in the house? A gun in my purse?”

“I have one,” said her mother. “There’s no harm in being safe.”

“You have a gun?” Lucia asked, and she could not have been more surprised if her mother had announced that she had voted for Jimmy Carter.

“Of course I do,” said her mother. “In the bedroom closet. Although if I’m driving by myself, I keep it under the seat just in case.”

“Is it in case of a log truck problem?” asked Evan.

It