Chapter 6
“Have you been waiting long?”
Mallory shook her head, sized up her older sister’s appearance.
The last time she’d seen Ariel, which was over a year ago now, she’d been distracted and not so put together.
As a general rule, Mallory never judged people for how they dressed or whether or not they’d run a brush through their hair.
It was just something she noticed about Ariel last time, since her sister had always been someone who cared about how she presented herself to the world.
She recalled being a little worried about Ariel, wondering if she had been able to take time for herself recently or if her life had been exclusively wrapped up in her kids.
But that day, Ariel was practically glowing. It made Mallory smile, then a thought occurred to her. “Are you pregnant again?”
“What?” Ariel laughed as she took a seat. Her smile was bright and there was a gleam in her eyes Mallory hadn’t seen in years. She was wearing a cute burnt orange sweater that looked great with her long dark hair. “No, I’m not pregnant. Why do you ask?”
“I just thought you seemed a little… peppy. You know how some women look all glowy when they are with child or whatever.”
“If anything, that should be a sign that I’m not pregnant. I love my children more than anything in the world, but I didn’t love being pregnant. Not even a little bit.” She took a sip from her water. “You remember how sick I was, and how bad my skin broke out? It was rough.”
“Okay, not pregnant. Got it. But the good news is that your skin looks great these days.”
“Thanks,” she laughed. “I’m wearing this expensive concealer my friend Estelle bought and then ended up not using. She’s the kind of rich where she doesn’t return things. It’s too much work. So she’s always giving me all this fancy stuff she doesn’t want or clothes that don’t fit her.”
Mallory whistled. “Sounds nice. Where’d you meet her?”
“At a publishing event,” Ariel said. “She runs her own publishing house actually.”
“Why were you at a publishing event?”
Ariel waved a hand in the air. “It’s a long story.
I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I need to figure out what I’m eating because I skipped breakfast and I’m starting to get that shaky, low-blood sugar feeling.
” She opened her menu and scanned the items. “I haven’t been here before, but I’ve heard that they have really good omelets. ”
“I’m not super hungry,” Mallory said.
“Why? Did you eat before coming out here?”
“Not really, but I stopped for coffee on the way here and it’s not sitting all that calmly in my stomach.”
Ariel cocked her head to the side. “Are you sure you don’t want to get some food? It’s on me.”
Mallory tried not to seem too relieved when her sister said this, but she did pick up her own menu again and started to look through the offerings more seriously. The waitress came back and Ariel went ahead and ordered both of them mimosas and coffee.
“A mimosa?” Mallory asked when the waitress walked away. “I thought you didn’t believe in having alcohol in the morning.”
“That was the old me.” Ariel grinned. “The new me loves a good mimosa.” She shrugged. “Besides, the kids are going to be at school until after 5. They all signed up for various sports and clubs this fall, so they are busy little bees.”
“Nice. That means a lot more free time for you, right?”
“Right. And I’ve been filling that free time with all sorts of fun stuff.
” Mallory opened her mouth to ask a follow-up question, but Ariel shook her head.
“No, no, more on that later as well. First things first, let’s talk about this so-called emergency you lied about.
” She narrowed her eyes at her sister. “I don’t see any broken bones or visible wounds, so I’m going to guess you’re at least physically okay.
Which, to be honest, was my initial assumption.
If you were having a true crisis, I wouldn’t be the first person you’d text. ”
“You might be!” Mallory said defensively. “Although, now that I know you wouldn’t take my emergency seriously, maybe I will put you lower down on the list.”
“Just tell me what’s going on. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Mallory said. “It’s not about me. It’s about mom and dad.”
Ariel’s smile fell. “What about them? Are they okay? Is someone sick?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that.” Mallory pushed past the little twinge of guilt for calling her sister all the way out there for what could very well end up being nothing.
“There’s just something going on at the house that I think you and Taylor should know about.
Mom has decided to sponsor this single mother who was living in a homeless shelter for a while. ”
“Uh—okay. What exactly does that mean?”
“She let the woman move into the house with her nine-month-old baby. They’ve been there for a couple weeks already, but the woman is… shady.”
Ariel gave her a look. “Shady how?”
“She’s really cagey when you ask her questions about her past,” Mallory explained.
“And mom doesn’t have any information about her either.
She doesn’t even know what shelter the woman was staying in!
There’s no paperwork or anything. I swear, it seems like this woman just showed up on their doorstep and asked to live there. ”
“Dad wouldn’t let that happen.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Mallory.
“But dad wasn't really involved in any of the logistics. He let mom take the reins, and he doesn’t seem to know much about it. Which is also weird, don’t you think?
Why would he let a stranger come and live in their house without doing more research? That’s not like him at all.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that.” She didn’t sound all that concerned though.
“But it’s not necessarily a bad thing if dad’s mellowed out with that kind of thing as he’s gotten older.
He used to stress about every little detail when we would go on family trips and stuff.
Do you remember all the research he did when we were thinking about getting a dog?
He drove himself mad and was going to take the rest of us with him if mom hadn’t called off the idea entirely. ”
“God, I wish they had just adopted a dog instead,” Mallory mumbled.
“Don’t say that.” Ariel clicked her tongue judgmentally. “This is a really nice thing they’ve decided to do. Who cares if she’s not super forthcoming? I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“The big deal is that this person could be scamming them!” Mallory didn’t mean to get so animated, and she looked around, embarrassed, after raising her voice.
“Okay, I’ll play along. How might she be scamming them?”
Though Mallory hated the way her sister made this all seem like some kind of game, she continued to argue her side of things.
“There are a million ways,” she said. “She could be planning to steal a bunch of stuff from them one time when everyone is out of the house. Or she’s going to go looking for their social security numbers at some point. Or she could just be lying about being homeless in the first place.”
“But why would she willingly go live with mom and dad if she had a home of her own?”
Mallory didn’t have an answer to this.
“Mal,” her sister said, using the tone of voice she reserved specially for sibling lectures. “Is it possible that your reaction to this has more to do with you than it has to do with this woman? Are you sure you’re not just… projecting?”
“What do you mean?”
Ariel sighed and leaned back into her chair. “Okay, I’m going to say this, but I don’t want you to get offended.”
“No promises.”
She made a face but went on. “It’s no secret that you’ve needed a lot of support from mom and dad over the years. You’ve gone back to live with them on multiple occasions, and it seems like you’re staying under their roof again now.”
“It’s temporary.”
“I know, I know,” she said placatingly. “I’m not judging you. You’ve always been way harder on yourself than anyone else in the family. That’s why I’m thinking you might be putting some of those feelings on this woman. What’s her name?”
“Sasha.”
“You might be putting some of those feelings on Sasha,” Ariel repeated.
“Maybe subconsciously you feel like you’ve scammed mom and dad a bit, and so you don’t trust that Sasha could really just be someone in need of help.
You want to make her out to be a villain because you’ve decided that needing anything from our parents is a crime. ”
Mallory was quiet for a beat. Then she shook her head. “No. I think she’s just a liar. But thanks for the psychoanalysis. I didn’t realize that you were filling some of that new free time with getting your license to practice psychology.”
“No need to be snarky,” Ariel said. “I wasn’t trying to psychoanalyze you as much as I was just trying to get you to see things from another perspective. Besides, that was some really insightful stuff! Some people pay their therapists a lot of money to have revelations like that.”
“Sorry,” Mallory said, shrugging. “But I don’t have any money and I lost my health insurance so that advice has to be on the house.”
Ariel laughed, but then her face quickly changed. “Wait a minute, you lost your health insurance… Does that mean you lost your job?”
Mallory said nothing.
“I was afraid that might’ve been the case when you texted saying you were back in Ferndale,” Ariel said. “But a part of me was just hoping you went home early for the holiday. What happened?”
“I don’t really feel like talking about it,” Mallory said. “It’s a long story anyway, just like you and the publishing woman.”
This wasn’t exactly true. Mallory probably could’ve summed up the events that led to her getting let go pretty easily.
She’d stopped making sales after realizing that she was potentially causing people harm, and then Donovan let her go.
But she didn’t feel like getting into all of that with her sister right then.
It wasn’t what she’d driven two and a half hours to talk about.