Family Law Gin Phillips (great books to read .TXT) 📖

maybe it would be really fun—I could picture that—and maybe we would kiss again, and maybe we would fall in love. Maybe we would go out together every weekend, and he would be my date for every dance, and we would sneak snacks into the movies together and his parents would go out of town and I would spend the night with him.

But—come on—chances were that we would sit at that bonfire, and I’d wish for him to hold my hand but he wouldn’t or I would reach for his hand and I’d wonder if he was only being polite when he let me hold it, and he’d ask me if I wanted to go to an actual bowling alley and I would wonder if he really wanted to go bowling or if he just thought I did, and, crap, I’d have to introduce him to Mom, and maybe on the second date or maybe on the fiftieth, we would be tired of each other and I would be standing right here in this exact spot, trying to find the words to break up with him or listening to him break up with me, and we would both feel terrible, and all of it seemed so pointless.

I watched Mom stretch across the sofa, taking over my spot, propping her feet on the wooden arm next to her nail polish. On screen, Jonathan wondered about the inscription on a gold cigarette case.

“I think it’s the stars,” John said, and I had lost him entirely. “Rachel? You there?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“The stars are the best, I was saying.”

“Right,” I said. “Definitely.”

“So. What do you think?”

“What do I think—?”

There was a quick wet sound, like either he’d taken a drink of something or licked his lips.

“I get the feeling you’re busy,” he said.

Too much work. This was too much work, and I wanted things to be easier.

“It’s a new episode,” I said.

I could hear his footsteps, or at least I assumed they were his. I wondered if he was pacing around his kitchen, too. For the first time, I could hear us breathing, gusts of air from both sides of the phone. I did not fill the silence.

“Well, I can tell you’re wanting to watch your show,” he said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for calling.”

I hung up just as tires squealed on the television and Jonathan joined in the car chase.

“He is such a nice-looking man,” Mom said, scooting to make room for me. “Did you get the homework thing straightened out? Who was it anyway?”

“Nancy,” I said. “It’s all fine.”

“You comfortable?” she asked, offering me a pillow.

“Yes,” I said, and it was true.

III.

If this was ancient Greece, where you had your choice of temples to offer up slaughtered animals to whatever god you wanted, Mom would bow at the Shrine of Kmart.

We needed an ironing board. That’s what she told me when she dragged me out of bed at ten on a Saturday morning, and I had no idea why it mattered that our ironing board was ripped around the edges—we did not haul it out and show it to company—but there was no point in arguing. We went to Kmart. We examined all the ironing boards, and she picked one that looked just like all the others. It was on the top shelf, though, so we debated logistics until Mom handed me a couple of dollars to go buy myself an Icee while she found a stock boy to lift down the ironing board.

I didn’t always give Mom enough credit: she rarely withheld beverages. When she deposited her paycheck every other Friday, she always let me buy a Slush Puppie at the mall, and I never loved her more than when I watched the pumps of green apple syrup splash against the bottom of the cup.

Coke and cherry were the flavors of the day at Kmart, and I sipped at my swirl as I turned back toward the housewares section. As soon as the ironing board expedition was over, I planned to spend the rest of my day with Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’d fallen back into my old Pellucidar books, and if I was honest, I’d been spending a lot of time wishing for some sort of tunnel to the center of the Earth, where I would stalk through jungles with mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. What I liked about Burroughs’s fantasies was that he told them with confidence. You dug a deep hole. The hole led you to an undiscovered world underneath the earth’s crust. Done. Backstory finished by page five. It worked for me because I didn’t want to waste time mulling over the science of it: I just wanted to go there. I would be mostly naked, but with good weaponry. Sometimes I thought about how my eyes would be a problem—vision was important when spears were involved, and if I lost a contact—well, the fantasy started to disintegrate once I started thinking about saline solution.

“Rachel?” I heard.

I turned, straw in my mouth. “Mr. Cleary?”

He was angling his cart around a display of buy-one-get-one-free Brawny towels, and he stopped between two aisles. He had stacks of air freshener and Roach Motels in his cart, which made me think the inside of his house was probably not a pleasant place.

“You here with your mom?” he asked, glancing around.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s trying to find someone to help her with an ironing board.”

“You’re wearing more pants than you were the last time I saw you.”

I slid a hand down my jeans and stared at my Icee. “Yeah.”

“Wait,” Mr. Cleary said. “Your mom needs help with an ironing board?”

He was wearing a blue T-shirt shirt and running shorts that showed more thigh than my shortest shorts. His face was tanned like he’d been to the beach. I thought of him as my parents’ age, but, under the store lights, it occurred to me that he wasn’t that old.

“She thinks we can’t reach the shelf,” I