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

was well-timed. Lucia smiled along with the rest of them, but she was thinking of when she was a teenager, already cringing at her mother’s talk of well-folded napkins and no chewing gum in church. She’d pulled into the driveway and felt a thump under her back tire. When she got out, she saw the squirrel, its back broken. Bloody and skull-mangled, dragging itself away from the car.

She had screamed like some bimbo in Friday the 13th, and she’d run to get her mother. Caroline had marched to the lawn-tools rack in the garage and then, as Lucia had covered her eyes, she’d bashed the squirrel over the head with the shovel, and Lucia had felt like she was watching a stranger.

“A woman alone,” Caroline said. “Things can happen.”

“What things could happen, Mother?” pushed Lucia, out of habit.

“A maniac could shoot through your window, for one thing.”

“And you’d shoot back?” Lucia said. “And kill him in a hail of bullets with your sharpshooting skills?”

Her father opened his mouth, making the slightest breath of a sound, but her mother laid a hand on his arm.

“If you’re working late in your office and a man is coming toward you,” Caroline said, “don’t you think pulling out a gun would make him pause?”

Lucia considered her mother, standing there with her immovable hair and her bare feet.

“It will make you feel safer,” her mother said.

“But will she actually be safer?” asked Evan.

“Than if she had no defense at all?” Oliver said. “Yes.”

Lucia looked from her parents to her husband and back again. They’d arranged themselves on opposite sides of the room, so the only way to carry on this conversation was to twist and turn.

“I have mace,” she said. “I keep—”

“I got it for her years ago,” Evan interrupted.

“Why are you two still standing up?” Lucia said. “Would you please go sit down?”

Oliver at least stepped from behind the counter, venturing onto the carpet. “I know you think you’re the same as a man, Lucia,” he said. “I’m not even disagreeing with you. Fine. But even a man—”

Lucia lifted a foot and brought it down hard, aware that the movement was perilously close to a stomp. It was easy to slip into old patterns with her parents, but they had their own patterns and they were still standing up instead of sitting on the sofa like reasonable people and everyone was talking too much.

“Dad, I don’t think I’m the same as a man,” she said. “Okay? You know why? Because Arnold Dobson, the jackass, does not walk into a courtroom thinking, oh, since I’m a man, I need to make sure that what I do reflects well on any men who might come after me. If I make a mistake, it hurts all men everywhere. No, Arnold Dobson walks into a courtroom thinking ‘I’m Arnold Dobson. I’ll do whatever the hell I want and it will be brilliant.’”

Her father walked to the sofa. He backed up until his legs hit the cushions, but he did not sit.

“Who’s Arnold Dobson?” he asked.

“A man,” said her mother. “A lawyer.”

Lucia ran a hand over her face. They were only trying to help, and she knew that. She looked back at the gun, dark metal on the white Formica. The truth was that she had liked the weight of it, and as she stared at it, her hands felt empty. She thought of bloody squirrels and shovels.

“All right,” she said.

“What?” said Evan, standing. Now everyone in the whole damn place was standing.

“I want it,” Lucia said.

“You’re not taking the gun?” Evan said, somewhere between a statement and a question.

She suspected that the look on his face was the same one she had worn when her mother announced she kept a gun in the car.

“They have a point,” she said.

“Good girl,” her father said.

“I’ll certainly feel better,” said her mother. “If that matters to you.”

A flash of red streaked past the glass doors. A cardinal, which Moxie would probably try to eat.

“Everyone can feel better,” Lucia said.

The cardinal circled back, winging past the wind chimes.

Soon her parents left, happy.

She was left with Evan, unhappy.

She locked the door behind her parents and turned back to the gun, still biding its time on the counter. She needed a place for it. Obviously, the bedroom made the most sense—the bedside drawer would be closer, but the top shelf of the closet would be safer.

She could feel Evan watching her.

“It makes sense,” she told him, moving his keys from the counter to the wicker basket. He always forgot and tossed them on the counter. “You’re the one who wants me to do something. Now I’ve done something. So tell me again why you’re angry?”

“I don’t have a particular problem with the gun,” he said.

She waited for him to finish, and when he didn’t, she turned to face him. He stood still until she came closer, both of them in the middle of the den, an empty patch of carpet between them.

“I have a problem,” he said, “with you pretending that the gun solves anything. You can’t just carry a gun around and assume that if someone shoots at you, you can shoot back. You can’t let this into our lives every day and every minute.”

She agreed with him completely.

“Evan,” she said, “I could get killed every time I walk from this house to my car. You think I don’t know that? You think I’m ignoring it? Every time I walk from the parking lot to my office. Every time I walk past a window. Every time I go to the grocery store. What do you expect me to do? Shut myself in the house? Hire bodyguards, who, by the way, wouldn’t be able to stop a bullet? At some point you have to accept that there is risk and that you cannot eradicate it. I am getting up in the morning and going through my day, and I’m doing everything in my power not to let this into our lives.”

He took several breaths