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.
“Of course.”
“And you trust me and you trust my judgment?”
He glances over at a man and a woman at the next table clearly involved in some sort of casual job interview that’s not going that well. “Yeah. I mean, I want to be involved…” He uses his knuckle to scratch beneath his nose. “I’m his father.”
“You are involved.”
“Okay.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that you’re kind of a solo artist, you know? Looking out for Number One.” He keeps his eyes trained on the floundering man with the résumé. “Not in a bad way.”
“Number One?” She lifts her eyebrows. “I make every meal, do laundry, do pickup and drop-off ninety percent of the week, and I’m looking out for Number One?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Marcus slouches, hunching in that fancy shirt of his.
“How did you mean it, then?” Rhea wants to give Bodhi everything. She kind of wants to give Terrene everything, too. Last time she checked, they’re not the same everythings.
He rolls his eyes. “I mean, you need help. Your job—your career, your business—it takes up a lot of space. As it should. But maybe you need to let some stuff go, let people in.”
“My job takes up space? Space? I think I’ve got plenty of space. I don’t think anyone’s suffering—least of all Bodhi, if that’s what you’re implying—from a lack of space.” She can’t help comparing herself to him, can’t help worrying that someday he might up and start to believe Bodhi would benefit more from living with him in his grown-up condo, being driven around in his luxury SUV. “Nobody’s claustrophobic here, Marcus.” She feels the mercury in her barometer sliding up. Same as it did that night at the Roosevelt Room. A little bubble of memory rises to the surface and pops: How many times do I have to explain myself?
She’d pressed the palms of her hands against the metal table to cool them, and when she brought them to her lap, they had left oily palm prints. She and the white, male, twentysomething John Doe officer both stared at them as they talked, so much that Rhea eventually moved her hands back, refitting them to the spot she left, even when her fingers got cold, even when they started to lose circulation. It was a long night, the smell of secondhand smoke and stale coffee, the ghost of body odor.