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

of Man. At some stage he would mention grabbing a drink together, and she would say, “No, I’m sorry. I’m married.” He would ask her to go for the drink anyway.

A hotel lobby opened up some sort of portal, a different life entirely.

She never fantasized about going up to a man’s room. But she did imagine the drink. A brush of hand against hand, accident or strategy? In this alternate lobby world, she would slide her finger up the stem of her glass, and she would watch his eyes follow the movement. She would cross her legs, and her knee would touch his, and if the scenario managed to play through fully, it ended with her saying good night and leaving him there.

Even in her fantasies, she could not imagine anyone but Evan.

Still.

She sank more deeply into her armchair, and a duck, emerald headed, floated past. A second and third duck followed. She watched the flash of their orange feet as they paddled. She sipped away half her drink, and she did not think of unknown men but of the Conway case, which nagged at her because she still hadn’t come up with any evidence of the husband’s affair. She had come to Louisville to depose a former nanny who had seen both parents with their children. This nanny had helpful things to say about Sara Conway’s warmth as a mother. She’d had nothing negative to say about Earl Conway, and that was fine.

Maybe there hadn’t been an affair. Maybe Sara Conway had imagined it. But the truth was that her husband had left her, and when the man did the leaving, he usually had some other woman waiting.

Lucia glanced over, seeing a space where the tall man had been sitting, and even as she turned her head, a shadow fell across her lap. The shadow belonged to someone neither dark nor handsome. A round woman, waist overflowing her khaki slacks, stood by the arm of Lucia’s chair. She wore a pin-striped shirt that identified her as staff, and her lipstick did not quite match the outline of her mouth. The woman held one arm close to her side, cradling several dinner rolls.

Seeing her, a duck sauntered up the concrete bank of the stream, teetering for a moment on the edge.

“They’ll peck if you try to touch them,” the woman said. “They’re skittish.”

“I wasn’t going to touch them,” Lucia answered.

The woman maneuvered a roll into her hand and began to break off bits of crust and toss them into the water. The duck slid back into the water, and others from all over the lobby started making their way toward the crumbs.

“You want to toss some?” the woman asked, offering her a roll.

“Okay,” Lucia said, accepting it.

“They know me,” the woman said. “I’m the only one who feeds them. I feed the koi, too. They love grapefruit. Did you know koi have back teeth?”

“You feed them grapefruit?” asked Lucia.

“I’m not supposed to feed them at all.”

Another duck—pure white—scaled the concrete wall of the creek and stomped toward the woman’s smudged Keds.

Lucia watched the ducks climb over one another, and she thought about diet. The nanny had mentioned that Earl Conway’s mother was a nice old woman, good with the grandkids, and this was meant as a mark in Earl’s favor. The nanny was a chatty sort of girl. She’d offered up that the grandmother had an ulcer, and almost everything upset her stomach. She ate a lot of cornbread and milk.

Lucia threw her bread, and it fell on the ducks like manna.

Earl Conway had started dutifully visiting his frail mother a few months ago, spending the night with her once a week. There were no hotel rooms charged on his card for those nights, so Lucia had assumed he was telling the truth about the visit. But there were also restaurant charges, high-end ones, and was a woman with stomach ulcers really spending time at steak houses? Was he spending those nights in his childhood bed or in some other bed altogether?

“So you’re not supposed to feed them?” she asked the duck woman. “Do they have, oh, an official feeder?”

The woman shredded half a roll before she answered. “No one is supposed to feed them.”

“What are they supposed to eat then?” asked Lucia.

“Algae off rocks!” The woman looked at Lucia head-on for the first time. Her lips held the shape of each word for a split second too long. “Isn’t that horrible? You shut up a living thing for its whole life and you tell it that it has to suck its food off a rock? No, I don’t think so. I won’t stand for it, no ma’am.”

Lucia had never seen such rage channeled by way of ducks, and it amazed her still how fascinating people could be. She listened to them talk all day long, and they could be cruel or dull or stupid, but often they were mesmerizing.

“So you take care of them,” she said. “Even though you’re not supposed to.”

The woman nodded. “Some of the other staff say, ‘It’s against the rules, Sheila, you can’t do that.’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m nearly seventy years old and I don’t give a rat’s patootie if it’s against the rules.’”

She—Sheila—pointed to the scrum of ducks.

“That duck there is a male chauvinist,” she said. “The brown one with the white splotch. He’ll grab the other ducks by their beaks and yank them around, especially the females. He’s such a jerk. But there’s a female duck who will yank him back. It’s a wonderful thing.”

Lucia picked up a roll that had fallen. “How long have you worked here?”

“Twenty years, give or take. That speckled one there’s gimpy. Could be natural causes, but you can’t tell. There was a kid here not long ago throwing ice at them—Ice! It could kill them!—and I went to the ice machine and walked up behind him and pegged him right on the back of the neck. The look on his face!

“‘How’s it feel?’ I said to