Cutting Teeth(84)

“That’s exactly what I was thinking. The police aren’t reckless. They wouldn’t just arrest anybody.” She chews a jagged piece of nail.

She waits for Doug to say more, but, then, he doesn’t know anything, really.

“Pastor Ben came on to me,” she says. Doug looks up. He sets his phone down beside him on the couch. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Putting down my phone,” he tells her.

“Why? It’s not a big deal. I’m just relaying more information.” She takes a seat on the beige overstuffed armchair that looks exactly like the more expensive one in the Arhaus catalogue.

“Putting the phone down feels about right. Probably a little old for kicking people’s asses.”

“Plus, he’s in good shape,” she says.

Doug shrugs at his belly—why do men’s bellies get so hard with age? She should look it up. He plants his socked feet on the rug and rests an elbow on each knee. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know. It just felt like something I should tell you.” Amongst other things, maybe, but it’s a start. “He touched my calf.” He watches her until she feels silly. “I know you trust me.” She rolls her eyes.

“I don’t.” Doug’s jaw goes slack, eyes serious.

“You don’t—what—trust me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t trust you, not entirely.”

Is she supposed to be offended? Can he do that? They’ve already been married such a long time. Isn’t trust the foundational principle of a relationship? “I don’t take your fidelity for granted,” Doug continues. “I don’t think that if I sit on my butt and ignore you and scratch my own balls that you won’t make eyes at another man.”

Mary Beth touches her cheek to feel that it’s warm. She’s blushing. Physically blushing. Her husband made her do that. “Do you think I made eyes at another man?”

“I’m picking up my phone now,” he says.



* * *



That night, the girls have filed out of the bathroom to their respective rooms with wet, combed-through hair. Noelle accepts a half-full sippy cup of her mother’s blood from the refrigerator, saving them all a lot of trouble.

She asks Noelle, “Where is the dress with the apples on it that Grandma Raines and Grandpa G gave you? They want to get a picture of you in it.” This is a common problem in the Brandt household, the need to supply photographic evidence of their children in various gifts sent by relatives.

She’s been maintaining a low-grade level of alert for the missing dress, checking casually in all the usual places, some of which aren’t that usual—bottom of the hamper, game closet, underneath the girls’ beds—but now it’s officially starting to drive her crazy.

“You must have seen it somewhere.” The news of Darby’s arrest has left her with a brittle edge. She keeps looking around, waiting for someone else to notice. Like it’s all an outrageous joke that only she is getting. Here she is still performing her own motherhood. The calm. The mind-numbing tedium. The supposedly bottomless well of patience. Has anyone considered—has she considered even—that there might, in fact, be a bottom to it?

Noelle is busy soaking in her thirty allotted minutes of iPad time on the bed.

Mary Beth revisits Noelle’s closet. She scoots out the bookcase cubbies, examining the back. She finds a dead cockroach, but no dress. On the floor of the closet are discarded dust jackets from picture books that wind up ripped anyways. She moves the stuffed animals, which don’t even belong in the closet in the first place, when out of a giant plush cat pillow falls a bracelet that Mary Beth doesn’t recognize—a pretty little bracelet with a manatee dangling off it. She bends to pick it up. “Where’d you get this?” she asks Noelle, who shrugs.

And then a yo-yo falls out of the cat. Mary Beth turns the giant cat pillow over and sees that it has been ripped apart at the back seam, much of the stuffing removed. She sticks her hand in and out she shovels a deluge of trinkets—children’s sunglasses, a new water bottle with whales on it, a hair clip, a bow, a notepad, another bracelet, a keychain, hand sanitizer, a plastic octopus.

“Noelle, where did you get all these?”

Her daughter shrugs.

“Noelle?” Mary Beth snatches the iPad out of her hands and switches it off. There. Noelle tucks her chin into her shoulder and squirms. “Noelle, I asked you a question.”

“I took it,” she whines.

“Took it from whom?” Mary Beth feels around in the cat and comes out with a gel pen. The Brandts don’t own gel pens.

“Lola, mainly.”

Noelle is going to cry. Mary Beth senses it, like a drop in air pressure. It’s coming. It’s happening. She can’t let that sway her.

“These things belonged to Lola? Why are they here? Why would you take them from her?”

“Because I can.” Her daughter sniffles, but there’s something in the performance that today, for once, Mary Beth isn’t entirely convinced by. “She lets me.”

“That’s not very nice.” Mary Beth stares down at the pile of odds and ends. What are the chances Lola Morton gave these to Noelle, let her have all this stuff for keeps? She bites her lip, unsure of whether she wants to know the answer. Normally she could call Darby and ask, but Darby’s in jail.