He studies her, trains the full intensity of those evergreen eyes on her. “Come on,” he nudges, coming to the edge of his seat. “You must have some inside beat. You’re the go-to, aren’t you? Room Mom? Pastors have to keep things confidential.” He’s teasing. She thinks he’s teasing. She laughs, but there’s nothing to fill it after, so maybe he really was expecting her to tell him something substantial.
She’s heard gossip, of course. The kinds of things one would expect. Someone saw a weird guy hanging around the school the week before and never reported it. Miss Ollie had a secret life. She killed herself and the family refuses to accept it. Some are more realistic than others, but Mary Beth makes sure to remind everyone: They’re just rumors.
Ben clears his throat. “You know,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to check in with you about your husband. You said you took on my Sexy Back Challenge?” He grins.
“Did. Yes. We fell off the wagon. There are more important things going on at the moment.” She doesn’t bother to hide her resignation. It doesn’t matter that it’s correct. There are far more important things going on than whether she and her husband of a decade can fornicate for fun every day, but, then, that’s kind of the point. There are always more important things going on because everything is more important than sex, really.
Half the time, Mary Beth doesn’t even know what she’s after. It’s not as though she’s a sixteen-year-old boy or a Yorkshire terrier, walking around with an uncontrollable urge to hump things. And she already feels connected in her marriage, so it’s not that. Sex to Mary Beth is a thing she wants to cut out of the world and drape herself in because it looks pretty on her.
And in exactly the way an expensive dress would be spliced from the family budget when times are tight, so too is romance when time is tight.
Pastor Ben looks as if he might have something to say about that. Might view himself the way, say, a doctor does, prescribing exercise as a preventative measure.
He rests his chin on his palm and looks up at her and, as he does, she experiences a very specific déjà vu in the way her teenage heart had felt staring at the back of Andrew Wohlensky’s head during algebra. And just like back then, a piece of her thinks, improbably, If only I could have him, just for a very short time, that would put my slightly broken heart back together again. She swallows as her head pings her, bopping her with the little pain signal. Remember me?
“I heard what you said,” Ben murmurs, like he knows she’d be embarrassed if someone else were to overhear. “I listened. About how you always feel like you’re the one, you know, pushing the agenda. Initiating sex. And I just want to say, Mary Beth, I think your husband is crazy.”
The graze of his fingers is so light on her calf it could almost be an accident. But Mary Beth’s whole body wakes up—zip, hello—finding that she’s been transported into a scene from her dreams, one in which she indulged a small fantasy that had involved This. Exact. Scenario. She sighs a long, deep sigh. That was a good dream. She’ll miss it. Because in reality, it turns out, Pastor Ben is kind of a creep.
THIRTY-ONE
Darby absolutely, positively does not feel like herself. She wants to call out sick from work, but, of course, you can’t really call out sick when you work from home. It’s like an unwritten rule.
It’s her husband, Griff. He’s given her an illness. An awful, soggy malaise. This morning, she relied heavily on inertia—an object in motion stays in motion—to combat the problem, buzzing around the kitchen, packing lunches and getting kids dressed and applying sunscreen like the house was on fire and she needed to get the family out, out, out the door. Sorry, no time to chat, she tried to telegraph to him.
“Everything okay?” Griff asked as he poured his first cup of coffee. “Need a hand?”
Under different circumstances, she might have replied something like “Ha!” Because that did sound like her when she got into a mood with him.
“Someone’s stompy this morning.” The crack of the refrigerator door sounded somewhere behind her.
“Busy morning,” she told him. “You know. Like always.” Her muscles were sore from the workout with Cannon, which should have been satisfying, but instead kept annoying her each time she bent down for a sippy cup or reached into a cabinet overhead.
It was a relief when Griff finally left for work and she no longer had to go to the trouble of avoiding him. She never avoids her husband, not even when it comes to sex, which she knows is a thing wives do, at least according to TV, but not Darby.
It’s just, no matter how she slices it, Griff lied to her. And he’s acting as though the special rules for surprise parties apply when they definitely don’t, do they? She could maybe understand that he wanted privacy around going to therapy. She could reluctantly concede that. And maybe the therapist suggested the improv and then … and then she gets turned around in her own logic the way she has so many times over the last twenty-four hours. Because if Griff could lie to her once, what’s stopping him from doing it again?
By the end of the day, she still hasn’t managed to kick the Griff-induced sickness.
“I missed you,” he says when he returns home. He’s got this new way about him. Self-confidence or something. She’s not sure whether she likes it.
She lets him kiss her on the cheek. “I need to take a quick shower,” she says. “I feel gross. Can you watch the kids?”
Both children have plastered themselves to a Netflix show about rainbow unicorn puppies. They look so happy, their little necks arched out, exposing their throats, colors bouncing off their faces. She doesn’t have the heart to turn it off and insist they do something that won’t turn their brains to mush. Like crafts. They should do more crafts.
She doesn’t really have any intention of taking a quick shower; she lied. See, two can tango.
She locks the door and turns the water to extra hot so the steam billows and the glass clouds and her lungs loosen.
Lola hadn’t asked to be fed today, hadn’t requested a single bite or sip of blood. Darby thinks this is a good sign. Some of the other children are greedier than ever. Bex is up to something like 500 milliliters a day. George’s mom looked horrified by that tidbit and Darby is inclined to agree, it’s a little too much information. But today, nothing. A sign, maybe, that this whole parasitical, leechlike behavior is drawing to a close. Just a phase! Just like old Dr. Meckler had said.
From inside the shower, she hears the doorbell ring—Who could that be? She freezes, soapy fingertips dug hard into her scalp. Unable to hear anything else, she returns to scrubbing. Just an Amazon delivery. Let Griff get it.
“Darby!” There’s a rattle on the locked door. “Darby!” Another rattle, then silence.
She switches off the shower and pulls the not-fresh towel from where it hangs over the top of the glass. Scrunching her sopping-wet hair in the towel, she hears voices in the living room.
Darby finishes drying off and grabs the first items of clothing she finds cast slipshod on the bathroom counter—a loose pair of gym shorts and one of Griff’s big college tees.