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

used to wipe down the wood, and she hoped Evan didn’t intend to put his hands on her next.

She looked down at her napkin, where she had sketched out various squares and words and diagonal lines. None of it meant anything, but sometimes a pencil in her hand helped her think. Sometimes a crowded bar helped her think. You could never tell. Sara Conway was sure that her husband was having an affair, and she didn’t seem like the hallucinatory type. But the bank statement and credit card records didn’t show any of the usual red flags. No large sums of money being withdrawn. No secret credit card or unexplained trips for two.

Still. It was possible that she hadn’t gotten the angle quite right yet.

The couple sitting next to her stood, the wooden legs of the chairs squawking. The woman bent down for her purse, and her elbow caught Lucia in the thigh.

The woman apologized profusely, and Lucia resituated her own purse in her lap. She felt the distinctive weight of the pistol shift, so different than the heft of her wallet and checkbook. She watched Evan’s hand slide across the pretzel-spattered wood, reaching for her drink.

“Not your usual,” he said, taking a swallow.

“I know,” she said. “For some reason I wanted something sweet. Diet Coke and rum sounded good.”

“It’s not Diet Coke,” he said, turning back to the screen. Or maybe he’d never turned away from it. “It’s regular.”

“What?” she said. “No, it’s not. I ordered Diet.”

His head bobbed slightly in time with a dribble down the court.

“Well,” he said, “the bartender must’ve heard you wrong, because he poured you regular. I watched him. You were drawing on your napkin.”

She tested her drink, letting it roll around her mouth. She tasted rum and melted ice and who knew which kind of Coke it was?

“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked.

At the end of the bar, three large men and one large woman in matching Tennessee T-shirts screamed in harmony.

“I thought you must have ordered it,” Evan said.

“I never order regular Coke,” she said.

He watched the screen.

She tried to end it there. She had learned one of the great lessons of marriage during their first month. Her parents had come for dinner, and she was cooking and setting the table. All that was needed was for someone to ask them if they’d like tea or water when they walked through the door, and Evan hadn’t done it. So she’d had to stop simultaneously stirring pasta and slicing tomatoes and buttering the garlic bread, and she had fixed the drinks while he sat chatting on the sofa as if he were a guest, too, and she was so angry she could hardly unclench her hands from the tea glasses. She didn’t turn on him then only because her parents were in the room, and by the time they left, she wasn’t angry anymore. The next morning she told him, “Do you know how I was running around cooking and you were sitting there with my parents? It would have been really helpful if you’d offered them drinks.” And he’d said, “Oh. Sure. I can see that. I’ll start doing drinks when people come over.”

She’d told herself, ah, this was good to know. Wait until the anger passes. Don’t attack.

“Evan,” she said now, “I have never ordered a regular Coca-Cola in the whole time you’ve known me. Not once. I only like Diet.”

“I figured that’s what you wanted this time.”

“I have never ordered one,” she said again.

He did not seem to realize what he had revealed. Was it possible that—all these years—he had paid so little attention? She had always felt so sure that no one had ever known her as deeply and as well as he had, but could that be true if he had these sorts of gaps? Had he never bothered to know her at all?

It would make these past months make so much more sense.

“It’s just a Coke, Lucia,” he said. “Order another drink.”

She shoved her drink away. It sloshed over the sides, and she blotted at the spill with her napkin.

Another missed shot by Ohio State. The far corner of the bar groaned, bottles slamming against wood. On screen, the Buckeyes trudged back down the court, clearly knowing it was over.

“Campbell needs to get his head in the game,” said the play-by-play guy. “Right now James Madison just wants it more.”

Lucia hated that kind of stupid talk. As if a player’s main flaw was a lack of desire. As if simple wanting made a thing happen. She imagined Campbell wanted to win this game desperately. She imagined he was thinking about nothing but making his shots, and yet the shots weren’t falling, and sometimes you had days like that, and thank God in real life announcers didn’t follow you around rendering judgment.

Evan rubbed his palms against the bar.

She wanted to get her head in the game. She wanted to feel what she used to feel.

II.

It was one of the first jolts of true spring, a spike to seventy degrees when the winter coats were still hanging by the door. The weather wouldn’t last, but it was the sort of tease that made Alabama a good place to be in March.

Lucia stretched her legs, her toes touching the grass. She could feel the wrought-iron pattern of the chair embossed on the backs of her thighs, but she didn’t mind it. She listened to the leaves gossip.

“We could go out,” said Paula, slicking more baby oil on her smooth brown arms. Evan’s sister had the skin Lucia had always wanted. “Seriously, you don’t have to cook.”

“It’s all done,” Lucia answered. “Just finger foods. Nothing fancy. Watson’s fine with cheese and crackers, right? Apple slices?”

“He eats anything,” Paula said. “Except blueberries. And onions.”

“No pretzels,” said Watson.

The three-year-old looked up from his place in the grass, where he had been hunting a grasshopper. He laid a hand on his mother’s knee, then let it trail down