“So?” he says. “Are you going to let me help you or what?”
“It’s not me.” She can tell he still doesn’t believe her, but then she probably deserves that. “They belonged to Miss Ollie. I think she was stealing money from the church.”
“No shit? Wow.” He nods, processing. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It’s complicated. There are … factors,” she says carefully. She thinks she might have told Darby about the documents; she was going to try to, but then Darby went and eulogized the woman popularly known as Miss Erin Ollie and made Rhea out to be the bad guy and, call it intuition, but Rhea could see no good would come from exposing her vendetta any further. But things change, people change, for the worse, for the better, and everything in between.
“There’s a parent meeting at the school. I found out at pickup.” Marcus rubs his head.
“Then you should go,” she says. “You’re Bodhi’s father.” It sounds so simple saying it now. Half of Bodhi belongs to Marcus and there’s nothing she can do to change that; she wouldn’t want to if she could. She can admit that, now that everyone’s being honest.
She thinks back on the Rhea that existed several weeks ago, how desperate she was to keep him out after the failed meeting with Mrs. Parker, when she went to Bodhi’s class that day. It was stupid. She wanted to pull Bodhi out, to make a big thing of it because she could, because she is Bodhi’s mother. But Miss Ollie wasn’t there. Her computer was open and an idea jumped into her brain, pure and simple. Change Marcus’s email address in the system. That was it. That was all she had to do to keep control. She went into the class contacts, and she entered the wrong email address for Marcus. A fake account. So whatever Miss Ollie sent, Marcus wouldn’t receive. Easy as that. She wanted so badly to avoid being held accountable to him; she was willing to do anything. And now, come to find out, Miss Ollie was quitting anyway. Why? Why would she do that?
She would do that if she were stealing money from the church and trying to get away with it.
He reaches over to her nightstand and turns on the table lamp—the nerve. “If I go to the meeting,” he says, “I’ll be fielding questions that only you can answer and I’m not doing that. This could be a good opportunity to get over with whatever needs getting over.”
“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.