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

dark hair hung wavy and jaw length; her tanned face was scrubbed. Back in Lucia’s Legal Aid days, there’d been a handful of women—a surgeon, a couple of professors, a bank vice president, plus Katherine Jemison and Lucia—who’d kept spotting each other across banquet rooms full of men in suits. They came together and cohered. Lucia had chatted with Katherine over occasional chicken salads and tuna melts for years until the other woman moved to Mobile after her divorce.

“Surely it’s unusual to take a client from out of town?” Katherine said, dropping into the leather chair across from Lucia’s. Her purse thudded to the floor. “I can’t believe you said yes. I don’t know—this somehow feels more serious than the actual divorce. Child endangerment? I can’t believe Bert is doing this.”

Lucia waited: sometimes the insults showed her something important. Sometimes not. Regardless, Katherine did not expand on her ex-husband’s faults.

“I’m glad you called me,” said Lucia, sitting. “How’s Miranda doing?”

They talked a bit about Katherine’s twelve-year-old daughter—her good grades and her obsession with Anne of Green Gables—and when Katherine’s shoulders had relaxed, Lucia skimmed a hand over the papers on her desk and explained how the meeting would work. They would parse each line of the ex-husband’s petition to modify the final order of divorce. They would chat. By the end, they’d have laid out all the information so they could get a good clear look at it.

“So you took Miranda to Rio de Janeiro in January?” Lucia asked.

“Yes,” said Katherine.

She did not elaborate, which made Lucia nod with approval. “And what did the two of you do on that trip?”

Katherine glanced at the molding of the ceiling then back at Lucia. She might as well have been sitting in front of a class reading some scientific paper on plankton. But when she crossed her legs, Lucia watched her ankle-booted foot twitch wildly, as if it were conducting an unseen orchestra.

“It was a short trip,” Katherine said. “Just over a week. I was working with colleagues at the Universidade Federal, gathering samples from Guanabara Bay. You remember the oil spill a few years ago? It was seventy thousand barrels into the bay. The question is whether the mangrove swamps can recover. There’s always been a pollution issue there, but domestic sewage and industrial waste is a different animal entirely from—how much detail do you want about my research?”

“That’s good. In court, you’d want to give the sort of general answer you’d give at a dinner party.”

The ankle boot circled and twitched. It always impressed Lucia in the courtroom when she studied a confident face and steady voice, then looked under the table and saw all the nerves, channeled.

“And the judge?” Katherine asked. “What will he want to see from me?”

It was the most important question, in some ways. It was amazing how few people thought to ask it.

“Competence,” Lucia said. “Warmth. No need to mention Cornell or degrees of any kind unless you’re asked directly. Your ex-husband’s lawyer is likely going to try to show that you’re more concerned with specimens under a microscope than your daughter. So minimize how much you talk about work.”

“Even when they ask about it?”

“Even then,” said Lucia.

“Do you think ‘workaholic’ is the only thing they’ll call me?”

Lucia lifted the corner of one typed sheet and then let it fall. This was, actually, the question that most concerned her.

“Don’t forget that your ex-husband has the burden of proof, whatever his claims,” she said. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“I am not,” said Katherine mildly. “I’ve gone on a grand total of four dates in the past two years. My options are not extensive. I’ve never brought anyone home to meet Miranda.”

“There’s no reason to believe he’s taking that angle,” Lucia said. “Let’s get back to the trip itself. You’re gathering samples. What does that mean, day to day?”

“My colleagues and I made several trips out on the bay. There were three of us per small motor boat. We had four sampling stations along the coast, each in a different mangrove forest. In the morning we’d gather sediment and leaf samples. In the afternoon, we’d go back to the lab—”

“Where was Miranda while you worked?” asked Lucia.

“She stayed with Roberta, my colleague’s wife. The two of them visited a couple of tourist sites, but mostly they stayed at home. They, oh, cooked Brazilian cheese bread and fudge balls. Miranda practiced her Portuguese. Roberta and her husband live in a nice neighborhood in a lovely sobrado—”

“Sobrado?” said Lucia.

“A loft.”

“Say ‘loft.’ And if you name the university that sponsors the research, call it the Federal University. There’s no advantage in speaking Spanish. Or Portuguese.”

This had been an issue in a previous custody case where the mother wanted to move back to her parents’ house in Arizona, which she kept calling a “casita.” Lucia had watched the judge’s face screw tighter with every repetition, clearly imagining sticks stuck together with mud. While it was not the entire reason they lost the case, it had not helped.

She waited for Katherine to argue, but the other woman only nodded.

“All right. My point is that while I was working, my daughter spent her days with a competent adult in a safe neighborhood, essentially baking cookies and learning about a foreign culture.”

“Good,” said Lucia. She had nearly forgotten how much she liked this woman. “That’s good. So Miranda was never alone in Rio?”

“Never.”

“The petition mentions the murder rate in the city. The statistic alone isn’t a problem. Your husband would have to prove she was actually in danger. Was Miranda threatened at all? Did she see any violence?”

“None,” said Katherine. “No blood, no guns, no criminal activity.”

“What does he mean by the phrase, ‘allowing inappropriate contact with prostitutes’?”

Katherine smiled for the first time. “We walked to a food market one morning, and we passed a couple of hookers. It was obvious—one of them wore a see-through blouse. The other one reached out to Miranda and caught a piece of her hair. Very gently. It’s curly