Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“You should call him,” Yarrow said one night. They were sitting at the kitchen table, eating tabbouleh salad and whole wheat bread Molly had brought home from the bakery. She’d lost her desire for junk food, craved sours to suit her mood. “He might be your soulmate.”
“Is Larry your soulmate?”
Yarrow smiled. “No. But that doesn’t mean Leo isn’t yours.”
It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about it. She missed everything about him. “I don’t know what I would even say. We’re beyond small talk.”
“You could thank him for the poem.”
Molly furrowed her brow. “Poem?”
“The mixtape?” Yarrow said, tilting her head.
“The song titles? It’s like a poem, don’t you think?
That’s the beauty of the mixtape as a form of expression.
You get the songs and lyrics. But then you get the arrangement.
And that tells a story. Leo left you a love poem.
” She took Molly’s empty bowl to the sink.
“I like you, Molly. But you’re not very perceptive. ”
It was a rare confluence—sunny day, Saturday, and Halloween.
Shops and vendors set up booths and tables, and kids in costumes ran screaming through the closed streets lined with pumpkins and cornstalks and bales of hay.
Normally, Molly didn’t work Saturdays, but it was an all-hands event with ghost-shaped vegan cookies, vats of hot apple cider, and pumpkin-spiced everything else.
She still had hours to go in her shift, but she was already exhausted.
Her back was turned to the table, but she recognized his voice.
Unmistakable. She balled up her hands for courage, cursed that she was wearing stained overalls, as if that were the problem.
Yarrow was right. She wasn’t very perceptive.
She’d finally taken a test. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t figure this out?
Twice, she’d called the phone number that Leo had given her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of him telling her to get rid of the pregnancy.
Whatever she decided, she would do it on her own.
But she was running out of time. And this?
This was the last thing she needed. She caught her reflection in the bakery window, could see him behind her now.
She gritted her teeth, conjured a hard smile, and turned.
“Hi, Charlie.”
Charlie checked over his shoulder like a witch was tapping it, which made Molly look too.
She scanned the crowd for Sideny, who would be easy to pick out among the dowdier people.
But it was almost election day. No chance she’d be strolling around Takoma Park.
Then Molly spotted the boys across the street.
They were dressed as burglars in matching costumes, holding hands with a sturdy girl who looked a little older than Molly.
She approached with the boys, who seemed entirely uninterested in Molly.
“That the new nanny? Doesn’t look like your type. Unless of course your type is young and vulnerable. Then, yeah, she’s your type.”
“Maybe my type is conniving little thief,” Charlie hissed. “She saw the bracelet. She’d been looking for it everywhere. I had to buy a new one exactly like it and hide it so she could find it. You’re welcome. She was planning to call the agency. Or the cops.”
“Stick it.” Molly wiped her hands on her apron, took off the scarf over her curls, and let them drop to her shoulders. “You’re hardly the one to hand out morality lessons.”
Charlie fumbled his bag of apples, and they rolled into the gutter next to the curb. The boys ran to grab them, and the girl with them stood back. “I think they’ve got it,” Molly said. “I’m Molly. I was their nanny before.”
“Boys,” Charlie said, setting the reassembled bag onto the table between them. “You remember Molly.”
The boys didn’t react.
“Guess you didn’t leave much of an impression,” Charlie said. “This is Helen.”
The girl’s face turned crimson. Up close, it was clear she was quite young.
Young and frantic. She was petrified. That asshole.
Molly felt physically sick, thinking about what might be happening to the girl.
She swallowed hard, tried to keep her legs from buckling.
The boys stared off at the cotton candy machine, no longer paying attention to the adults.
Molly walked around the table and put both hands on Charlie’s chest. “How’s this for an impression?” she said, and shoved him hard. She pictured him sailing through the air. Instead, Charlie stumbled into Helen.
Molly looked at her hands like they weren’t her own.
She could have told Sideny right away. She could have refused Charlie’s advances.
She could have quit and gone back to Maine, and she’d considered it.
But the thought of that house, that ghost. No.
She swelled with regret. She should have hidden a warning for the next girl in the basement.
She shouldn’t have accepted Charlie’s hush money.
Keeping quiet had never done her any good.
She spiraled around thoughts of protecting herself, protecting other people.
She’d even thought she was protecting Maeve when she pushed Conor O’Kane. And look where that got her.
She pointed at Charlie. “Leave her alone. Or I swear . . .” She said it evenly, like a killer.
She retreated coolly into the bakery, through the swinging gate, into the kitchen, to the staff bathroom.
She closed the door, pressed against it, and hung her head.
The checkered floor tiles shifted in a slick of tears.
She boiled at the unruliness of her life.
It came at her, blunt and thudding, tomatoes thrown at a bad actor. What a colossal fuckup I am.
She grimaced into the scratched mirror, wished she had ever bothered to ask Maeve what it was like to have a baby, what it was like to be someone’s mother.
What had it been like to be her mother? That busted-up girl staring back at her was clueless and dumb and irresponsible.
“What do you even have?” she asked. “You don’t have anything. ”
But she did have something. If only she could figure out how to fight for it.