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

like she was casting some terrible spell. I watched her stiff arm, the bulging veins in her hand, and I thought of the last time she’d tried to hit me. I’d been ten years old, and she’d grabbed the hairbrush from the counter and raised it to smack my knuckles, always her favorite spot, but I’d caught the brush instead, jerking it away from her. We’d stared at each other, breathing hard, and she never hit me again, but I could tell she missed it.

“We can’t pick,” she said. “I love you more than anything in this world, and if something happened to you, it would kill me. You don’t care about that, I know. But I would do anything for you and you know it. I will not let you run around with someone who has an assassin after her. You could die. Do you even understand that? Lucia did. She didn’t even argue with me. Do you understand that you could have gone over there and never come home and laid there bleeding on the floor and I wouldn’t have been there? I wouldn’t have been able to do anything?”

Her eyes were wet, but her face was dry except for the Pond’s. She stared at me, her arm still reaching, fingers splayed.

I thought I had seen every possible feeling on her face, but I was slow to recognize this one. Terror. She hadn’t moved her arm yet because she couldn’t. She didn’t look like a magician. She looked like my grandfather after his last stroke, when he was lying in the hospital bed and couldn’t even roll himself over.

“Mom,” I said.

She dropped her arm and it slapped against her smooth leg. Now the tears were falling.

“I would do anything for you,” she said again, her voice shaking. She swallowed. “It doesn’t matter if you think I’m stupid or pathetic. It doesn’t matter.”

Every time I was close to hating her, she made me hate myself instead.

I thought about what Mr. Cleary had said about girls thinking their mothers didn’t love them. I hadn’t been lying to him. I knew Mom loved me. She loved me more than anything. She loved me too much.

She grabbed her lotion and her towel and her plastic tumbler of water, which sloshed all over the carpet. She marched into the kitchen—again, almost funny—and I heard the tumbler land with a clatter in the already full sink. I waited for her to come back into view. I was staring at the kitchen table, cluttered with mail and receipts and boxes of Lipton tea, when something blurred through the air and smashed against the lemon wallpaper. I knew it was glass by the sound of shattering.

A juice glass, I guessed. Hard to tell, unless I stepped closer to the broken pieces.

I could hear the air coming through my nose. I’d been having trouble with loud noises. I watched the kitchen and waited to see if there would be more. I was always waiting to see if there would be more. It had been a while since the last explosion—nearly a year ago? A ceramic potted plant that scattered soil and roots all over the patio. Once it had been a gravy boat, and, as Mom swept up the pieces, she’d said that we never used it anyway.

Now she strode into the den, empty handed, straight backed.

“Don’t go in the kitchen barefoot,” she said as she brushed past me, keeping her face turned away.

I watched her walk down the hall, talking under her breath, nightgown slipping off her shoulder again. My head was full of words, and maybe that’s why she talked to herself, because she had to let the words out somehow. But as I whispered there in the middle of the den, the smell of lotion around me, it wasn’t my mother I was talking to. It wasn’t even myself.

You don’t understand, I said. That’s what I wished I had been able to say to Lucia. You don’t know her at all. You think she’s the person you see in your front yard, but you can’t see her when the moths come. You think she’s scared, and she is, but that doesn’t mean she’s weak. You think she’s powerless, but she’s got all the power in this house and sometimes I think if I don’t get out of here, there won’t be anything left of me.

I thought of Mom’s face, terrified. Her arm, paralyzed.

And I was just like her. Frozen. I looked at the blood on the carpet, and I knew I should go grab a paper towel or maybe a broom, but I only stood there.

1982

Rachel

I.

I didn’t exactly dislike Tamara Vance, but I avoided her if possible. She was round and soft and big chested, and while I didn’t hold that against her, when the boys asked her to jump up and down, she accommodated them, pretending she didn’t understand why they asked.

When I saw her at Tina’s party, “Rock Lobster” was playing too loud on the stereo, and there was that down, down, down part where everyone wiggled themselves to the floor. Tamara jumped off the sofa, giggling.

“What?” she asked, falling onto one knee, her jean miniskirt barely keeping things covered.

“Going down,” said a boy named Travis, and everyone laughed, including Tamara.

Several other boys were dancing, holding their noses and swimming down to the floor. One of them jumped off the coffee table.

“Why did the Auburn fan get fired from the M&M factory?” Travis called out over the music. “Because he kept throwing out all the Ws.”

Tamara climbed back onto the sofa. It made me angry how hard she tried to please them. Did she think that because the boys liked her boobs, they liked her? Because they didn’t even like her boobs. They just liked the physics of them.

“Go-o-o-o-iiiiing down,” I heard Tamara say,