Cutting Teeth(88)

“I can’t tell the other parents about Miss Ollie stealing money.” It’d be too much of a risk, too high a possibility of getting mixed up in a bad situation, the way she had back at the Roosevelt Room when no one wanted to hear her side of things. She feels like she’s got a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but some of the most important ones seem to have gone missing, like Lola’s shoes.

The thing she never appreciated enough about Marcus until now is he knows enough not to ask why.

“Okay,” he says.

“You think I should go to the meeting with all those other parents who hate me?” She looks at him like he’s someone whose opinion she cares about because he is.

“My theory is that parenting is sort of like a horror movie,” he says. “Like one of those really bad eighties slasher flicks. You don’t know what the hell’s going to jump out at you next. And the worst thing you can do is split up.”

Since the moment Bodhi was born, she’s been performing motherhood, her version of it, in a one-woman act with the worst critic in town sitting front row—herself. She’s tired, though. And Bodhi’s only four. Four years is long enough to get pretty exhausted, even with yoga and crystals and essential oils and all of the extremely worthwhile and valid self-care things she’s been cheerleading for.

“Here’s the thing,” Rhea says, pushing her sheets past her hips. “Lola didn’t kill Miss Ollie.” She doesn’t know what the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle will reveal, but she does know that.

She’s kept the silver A close by, trying in vain to wait for a clear sign from the universe that never came. The only thing she knows is that there must be some connection to the murder and this silver trinket, and that connection isn’t Lola. Rhea has been shutting everybody out, convincing herself that she didn’t need them. When Darby said all those nice things about Lola and Miss Ollie’s relationship, a part of Rhea had felt relieved. She’d thought: Good, I can put you outside, too. Maybe deep down she thought that the more people she let in, the greater chance they had of finding out she was a fraud, but turns out she went and exposed that all by herself, just the way she liked it. She does need her people and, if she’s lucky, they need her. If anyone’s going to hear her who matters, Rhea knows she’s going to have to go down to the school and face them.

“I’ll go to the meeting,” she says. “But I need you to do something for me in the meantime.”

Marcus smiles back at her with big, white teeth. “Anything you need.” He winks at her. “You name it.”

This is going to take some getting used to.





THIRTY-SEVEN




Ben Sarpezze. Ben Sarpezze. Ben Sarpezze.

Darby couldn’t wait until she got back to the car to pull out her trusty phone and start googling.

Down two children, who are now safely—ha!—at school, she cracks her knuckles, preparing to knock out some of her best internet sleuthing to date. It’s like she’s been training for this for years.

Darby hates her phone, but only because she loves it so. Naturally, she would be irritated with—maybe even fire—any babysitter who dared look at her phone while watching the children. They need to be engaged. On the kids’ level. Not liking pictures.

But Darby can’t seem to hold herself to the same standard. Some mothers may need a glass of wine to ease them through dinner or bath time, but if asked to make a choice—alcohol or iPhone—Darby would pick Apple every day of the week. She doesn’t even know when it got so bad, this love affair with the small black rectangle in her palm, only that at some point she began to need this intimate time with her eyes glued to her screen the same way she used to crave chocolate or sex or really good weed.

Even when she intends to set the phone down and focus, she often finds herself picking it right back up again to look up just one more thing. Before she forgets. And so it goes. Reading articles about the dangers of screen time while ignoring her own children, wondering if every mother is doing the same or whether she truly does have a problem.

But this is different. She really must look into this one thing—just one.

She pulls up the church website and anxiously waits for it to load.

She recognized that guy. Sort of. The handsome new pastor, the one trying to raise money for the youth center, but now Darby needs to know who he really is.

She scrolls the church staff bios until she finds him. Ben. Associate pastor.

He’s young, like, way young. Probably his first job out of seminary, if she needs to guess, and not that Darby is some kind of expert in this arena, but she imagines a position at RiverRock Church is a pretty big score right off the bat. How’d he manage that?

He came to the church six months ago and “has a heart for addiction and rehabilitation ministry.” That sounds noble, Darby concedes. Other than that, his biography is scant, just another note about how he digs the outdoors and experimental restaurants.

Okay, so that’s Ben Sarpezze in a nutshell. A man who looks exactly like her husband from the back. So freaking what? It’s probably nothing. But then is there any such thing as “probably nothing” when her daughter is suspected of murder?

Darby opens up a new browser window on her phone and enters his information into the search. She scrolls past a few fruitless Yellowbook entries and linked ads for Ancestry and 23andMe, unsure of exactly what she’s hoping to find. Nose to the ground, she thinks, her eyes traveling lightning fast across the screen. And then, just like that, she spots a KNTV news story from nine years back and feels a corresponding pitter-patter in her chest as she taps it with her finger and waits for her slow, old iPhone to load. It’s like driving behind an elderly lady. Her patience, which was not so impressive to begin with, shrinks.