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

“What?” asked Lucia, caught up entirely.

“He calls me a bitch,” Sheila said, her bread-free hands landing on her hips. “Can you imagine? A twelve-year-old. And I can see the little girls at the front desk, smiling. Smiling. They think I’m a bitch, too. But I don’t care. The manager comes over, sticking out his chest, telling me to apologize because the boy’s parents can sue, just for me throwing ice. I say, fine. I apologize. The girls are still at the desk, covering their mouths with both hands, and they’re enjoying the scene. I say to the manager—he quit last year, went into some sort of business with fake fireplace logs—I say, ‘Now, Barry, if he’d killed one of those ducks—’”

“‘You call me Mr. Price,’ he says to me. Mr. Price. Likes he’s the principal, and I’m a kindergartner. I wanted to say, all right, Barry, how about I call you whatever I want, and you and those girls at the desk call me whatever they want.”

She had to stop for a breath.

“People can be nasty,” Lucia said.

“Nasty and fragile,” agreed Sheila.

Lucia thought of Earl Conway. He pulled me aside when he came to pick up the kids, Sara Conway had said, smiling on the other side of Lucia’s desk, and he asked me why I picked such a bitch of a lawyer. She said it as if it were the sort of comment that Lucia would chuckle over.

She thought of Garrison Langley. Amenable.

She thought of Judge Musgrove. Just to see your sweet ass walk out the door.

Judge Simmons, telling her to come see him in his chambers, the walls decorated with one picture of Jesus Christ and one picture of George Wallace in matching frames. I want to tell you that short skirt makes my blood boil.

Ben Stallworth, a lawyer. You’d win more cases with lower-cut blouses.

Judge Stone, who refused to let her appear in his courtroom because he didn’t think feminine ears could handle the coarse details of a paternity case.

Judge Mathison, who slapped her on the butt.

Tim Blankenship, a lawyer, who slapped her on the butt.

Louis Carlson, a lawyer, who slapped her on the butt.

Janet Carlson, Louis’s wife, who showed up at Lucia’s front door, pushing past Evan, calling Louis’s name, as if Lucia would ever touch the man. As if she would have some illicit affair with her own husband standing right in the den. He has trouble saying no sometimes, the wife had said, as if Lucia would have coerced him into sex.

That wife whose name she couldn’t remember, the one who had called her at the office about yet another husband, saying, I know you’ve had drinks with him, as if half a dozen other lawyers hadn’t been at the table, too. If men were fragile, women weren’t much better.

“Everyone is just flapping and squawking,” Sheila said. “Terrified.”

Lucia could only meet the woman’s eyes by crooking her head back. The angle showed her a square jaw, a creased neck, and the underside of wide, flattened breasts. She looked like some pagan statue, rough carved.

Sheila tossed another smattering of crumbs. Then another. Eventually her hands were empty, and she slapped them against her pants. A duck ambled up the incline toward her, and she kicked at it, stopping short of making contact.

“No more for tonight,” she said.

She told the ducks good-bye. She told Lucia good-bye. Before she had even disappeared behind a wall of broad leaves, the ducks had drifted away. Lucia stuffed her paper napkin into her empty glass. She had spilled crumbs on the chair, and she was brushing them off when she felt someone standing over her.

She saw his shoes first. Black leather, not too shiny. She recognized him immediately, and she thought of bread crumbs. Had she led him to her, somehow? Laid out some invisible path? He nodded to the empty seat next to her. No, not a nod. A tilt of his head. He looked even taller than he had from across the lobby.

“Would you mind?” he asked. “Or were you leaving?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

He sat down, his feet extending nearly into the water. His jaw was dark with stubble, and he wore no rings on his fingers.

“Jake,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Lucia,” she answered, offering hers.

He jerked his head toward the turquoise stream. “Was that woman kicking ducks?”

She laughed and leaned toward him.

Rachel

I.

Before our biology quiz on the skeletal system, the boys in the back corner sang a song:

Open up her mandible

Or down on her patellas

Doesn’t know which way she wants it

So you have to tell her.

They drummed their hands on the edge of the lab table, keeping the beat, saying the same lines over and over until Mrs. Hughes finally walked into the room, sipping her coffee.

It was a catchy tune. People were laughing. Girls were laughing. Not all but some. I kept both palms on my lab table, fingers spread like when you make turkeys from your handprint. Next to me, Nancy Mann tugged her banana clip loose from her long blond hair.

I wondered, do you really have to tell her which way she wants it?

I felt like I understood sex. We had HBO at home. And yet if I were doing it for the first time, might I appreciate some guy’s advice? I might. But that wasn’t what Tyler and Kevin and Craig meant, and I knew it. What did they imagine when they sang that song? What girl did they see, or did they see any girl at all?

“Pencil and paper,” called out Mrs. Hughes, her slip hanging below her skirt. “Notes and books put away.”

Craig Lewis had a belly like a grown man.

Tyler and Kevin had thrown up in the same umbrella stand at Tina’s house.

Here is another thing I wondered: how were you supposed to know what you wanted?

II.

Mom and I sat on the couch. We’d