Cutting Teeth(66)

She should be thrilled. In the last two days alone, orders for Terrene have quadrupled. A freshly verified Instagram account. A shining city on a hill. An example of a self-sacrificing mother doing everything in her child’s best interest.

She is all those things, she insists, as if someone has argued the point. At least in spirit, where it counts. And when she lays her head down at night, she sleeps just fine, thanks. Better, even, given how her advisor’s been fielding investor calls left and right. There may even be a wait list for different rounds, who knows. Well, Rhea knew, as a matter of fact.

If Rhea were listening closely, she might hear her dreams falling into place—click, click, click—like music. Instead, she hears the creaking of the joints as the ground shifts beneath her house of cards. A single detail from her early twenties could change everything. There is music there, all right, music she’s got to face. In the form of Marcus.

“Is this about the—the biting, because Rhea, I swear, I’m not denying him. He just doesn’t want to do it with me. I offer, just like you said. I don’t know, maybe I’m not doing it right, but I am trying.”

The number of opaque Yeti tumblers sent to school with the children has multiplied. My nine-year-old thought it was Spaghetti-Os in there and took a sip without me knowing it and threw up, Chelsea told them one day in abject horror, and I thought: My god, we’ve got to take him to the hospital, he’s vomiting blood. And then I realized, that was my blood. And I almost threw up, too. Rows of the discreet containers line up in the new in-class mini fridge, masking tape labels stuck to each. Mamas measure out the milliliters, the way they once did in ounces with breast milk. Here and there, a child will run to his or her mommy at the end of the day with a faint red-orange mustache still smudged across his or her upper lip and the mother will lick her thumb and try to smear it away while the kid whines, “Yuck.” It’s like they’re walking on glass. She can feel it in the fragile, baby-bird way the mothers carry themselves, as if they’ve regressed, gone back in time to those frangible newborn days when mothers pulled on outside clothes and rubbed in a bit of foundation, swiped mascara, and tried to look like real people, not crumbly scones destined to fall apart the moment one accidentally bumped her elbow too hard on the edge of the car door.

Rhea never intended to outright lie on-air, but then the day before, she opened up a vein and siphoned a hundred milliliters into a brand-new tumbler. Just in case, she told Bodhi, who didn’t really care as long as he got to play. The tumbler comes back, and every day since she sends the same hundred milliliters; back and forth it goes. She’s afraid to open the lid and find out what it looks like in there. And so she doesn’t. No need.

She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. I think we’ve got Bodhi under control.”

He puffs his cheeks out and exhales. He’s so scared of doing the wrong thing and she doesn’t exactly do anything to alleviate that fear. Some fears are healthy.

“You know Terrene is growing, and this is a critical time,” she says, fingers tightening around her warm cup. She studies the soft green leaves of the willow on her arm and reminds herself how the tree’s supple branches allow it to withstand strong winds.

One of the beauties of working for herself is that she hasn’t had anyone run a background check in years. Her mug shot’s out there. But it’s not out there, out there.

Still, sometimes she looks it up out of a masochistic need to keep it fresh in her mind.

She majored in bioethics at a college she hated but could go to for free. Her father warned her against wasting her time studying liberal arts, a term he learned from one of her brochures and used like a swear word. After college, she moved back to Austin, took a job in public health where she earned $35,000 a year organizing files in a horrible brown office with moldy carpet, playing waitress on the side for cash. She hated her father most on the days when it felt like he was right.

That was before. Because after, it turns out you can’t have an assault record and work for the state. Really, you can’t have an assault record and work much of anywhere these days.

But Rhea made do. She spent most of her time working as a personal executive assistant for a man who asked in the interview: Do you mind if I run a background check? To which Rhea answered very confidently that she wouldn’t mind at all and then obviously he was too lazy to run it. She even landed her job as a nanny that way. Oddly enough, Marcus didn’t think to ask for her arrest record before they jumped into bed together either.

“Yeah, I’m here.” He nods. “Whatever you need. I’m so proud of you. You’re such a role model for Bodhi.”

“Thanks.” But there’s heat behind her eyes.

“Just like my mother was for me,” he adds. “I feel really lucky that somehow we wound up with you.”

“I guess that’s my point.” She blows on her coffee. “You do think I’m a good mother, right?” For the record, Rhea hasn’t spent many moments questioning the morals of her past choices. She’s not making excuses for them. She should never have laid hands, she knows that. But what’s done is done. Only, once you become a mom and a female business owner, that stuff doesn’t fly. Oh sure, people love a good redemptive arc for fathers, just watch a few comedies from the 2000s and you’ll see what she means. The dad that gets his shit together. Stops drinking. Stops smoking. Starts showing up in his kid’s life ten years too late. But mothers? No. There’s no redemption for mothers. Mothers better be born perfect. Pure and virgin white.