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

A movement behind Margaret. A bare foot on the white carpet.

“Mom?” Rachel said.

Lucia couldn’t see her face. She leaned forward, but the door blocked her view.

“Go back to the den,” Margaret said, still facing Lucia.

“But—”

“Now.”

And that was all. Rachel disappeared, never more than a quiet voice. Lucia remembered her own mother’s voice and how a single word would draw a line that could not be crossed. She was surprised, though, that Margaret was capable of drawing those lines, and she was shocked that Rachel would not step over them. Children were supposed to crave boundaries, though, weren’t they? It was comforting, on some level, to be told what to do.

“Margaret,” she said, “do you think I don’t lie awake at night thinking about what might have happened? I love her like family. I understand if you don’t want her coming by the house for the foreseeable future. I can understand if—”

“She’s not your family,” Margaret interrupted. “She’s not your responsibility. I don’t want her anywhere near you. There’s no telling where the lunatic might show up next. He could be anywhere. He could follow you anywhere, and if he sees her with you, he might come after her.”

“You’re talking to me right now,” Lucia said sharply, because she couldn’t stop herself. “Doesn’t that mean you’re making yourself a target?”

“I don’t care about me,” Margaret said.

Something about that sentence felt more real to Lucia than anything else in the woman’s monologue.

“I apologize,” said Lucia. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

The apology seemed to soften Margaret. Her shoulders lifted and fell.

“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” she said. “I hope they catch whoever did it, but the truth is that you’re not my job. Rachel is.”

Lucia leaned back, and her heel caught on the step, sending her stumbling. She grabbed at the doorframe to steady herself, fingers digging into ivy and scraping against stone. She let her hand rest flat against the rock. She thought of how wooden walls splintered so easily.

She had replayed the scene in the sunroom endlessly, and she would have been willing to bet that she’d thought about bullets through the head—copper curls frizzing, the fragile feel of a skull under her fingers—every bit as much as Margaret had. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe her flashes of bloody what-ifs—Evan never stopping in the doorway, never prodding them to leave the room, Rachel still sitting on that sofa when the first bullet smashed through the glass, Rachel dead, brain and bone everywhere—maybe the thoughts that haunted her were nothing compared to Margaret’s imaginings.

It was possible that Margaret was right. Caught up in the rhythm of their argument, Lucia would have been slow to acknowledge it, but now she worked a piece of gravel loose from her shoe and let herself contemplate the other woman’s words. She thought of Rachel tucked away somewhere inside the house, barefoot and agreeable. This girl was not Bequeatha Long, ambushed by race and poverty and history and bureaucracy. It would take very little to make sure that she was safe.

“You’re her mother,” Lucia said. “Of course, you want what’s best.”

“You agree then?” said Margaret.

“I do. Can I talk to her, though?”

“Why?”

“To explain. To let her know that—”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Margaret said. “It would only complicate things, don’t you think?”

Lucia lay a hand on the stone again, pushing. The pressure loosened something in her shoulder.

“If she disobeys me,” Margaret said, “I hope you’ll do the right thing. You know how she is.”

“I do,” Lucia said.

V.

Rachel knocked on the door the next day. As Moxie galloped down the hallway, Lucia opened the door.

“I couldn’t get away until now,” Rachel said. “Mom was calling in the afternoon to make sure I came home straight from school and finally today she—”

“You heard us talking, right?”

“Yeah. I’m so sorry she talked to you like that. I’d told her that—”

“She’d like you to keep your distance from me,” Lucia said. “I can’t blame her.”

“Why won’t you let me finish?” Rachel said, flapping her hands. “She’s wrong. That’s what I’m trying to say. The way her mind works—she overreacts. She can’t tell me to stay away.”

“She can tell you,” Lucia said. “She’s your mother.”

Rachel shook her head frantically. “Do you think it’s, like, your fault? It wasn’t. And I’m fine. Totally fine. Look, I told her that I’d keep away from your house for a while, and if we just come up with a compromise, I’m sure she’d agree to it. You just have to help me. Maybe I don’t come by here for the next month? Two months?”

“Your mother thinks it should be more permanent,” Lucia said. “And she’s not wrong. I couldn’t—”

“Permanent?” said Rachel.

“I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you,” Lucia said.

Rachel kept shaking her head. “You mean I should stay away until they catch whoever did it, right?”

“I promised your mother that I wouldn’t see you.”

She’d had the words planned, anticipating this visit, and it was easier to say them than she’d expected. As she spoke, she noticed a swirl of inked words on Rachel’s hand, a cursive message from some friend, surely, maybe Tina or Nancy, and how was it that she’d never met either of them after all the stories she’d heard? She took in the ragged shorts, frayed like all the girls were wearing them, and she wondered if all the girls wrote on one another’s hands and wore shorts in December. She wondered if all the girls refused to carry umbrellas and ran bareheaded to the car in pouring-down rain, and she wondered if all the girls lapsed occasionally into bad Katharine Hepburn impersonations. The last one, she thought, was only Rachel. No one else.

She reached out, wrapping her arms around Rachel. She kept it efficient. This was one thing she could do, and she would finish it and it would be done. She stepped back inside and closed the door. As she turned the deadbolt,