the police could unearth the truth. But Laurel didn’t want Moreno back here vivisecting her child.
She wanted Thalia. Needed her. She had needed her from the beginning.
David had said he would help, but his version of help had been bringing in Mother. Now Mother was grinding her down. By the time Mother left, David would be home, earnestly helping in all the wrong ways, not wanting Thalia back to stir around in the corners of their life. Laurel would forget what she knew in this moment, so true it felt like it was a glowing hole in her center.
She knew things best when she was quilting. In this room, she didn’t follow patterns to please Mother, or let everything ugly out to eat up the image to please Thalia, or worry that David wouldn’t like it, which would be tantamount to his not liking her. The bride was right. She knew it. Inside these walls, that ended it.
Here in her quiet room, Laurel knew what was right for Shelby, too, and she understood what Molly had come to ask her to do. Molly hadn’t really wanted Laurel, and she certainly had not come hoping for a path to Laurel’s mother. Laurel looked at the phone. Fearless Thalia, the seeker, the digger, who looked at things hard and bald enough to learn them and become them, was only eleven numbers away.
Laurel reached for the phone before Mother could knock again, or before yet another neighbor or friend from church called, offering sorries and support and tying up the line.
The phone rang twice in Mobile, but Thalia didn’t answer. Her husband did: “Spotted Dog Theater.” Gary had a deep voice, rich and smooth, as if his throat had been coated in dark chocolate.
“Hey, it’s me,” Laurel said. “Is Thalia there?”
“Why, yes. She is,” said Gary in a pleasant tone.
Then he hung up.
To fight with Thalia was to take on Gary, too. Laurel depressed the button to get the dial tone back, then hit redial.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gary said, picking up halfway through the first ring. “Were we not finished?”
“May I speak to my sister, please?”
“Nope!” Gary said cheerfully, and hung up again.
Laurel took three deep breaths, then hit redial again.
Ethel Merman answered. “Whoopsy-doo!” said Ethel. “My hands are slippery!” and the phone banged down.
Gary’s voice was extremely versatile for being set so low.
Laurel buried her face in her hands. Enough. It had to be now, or it would never happen.
She stood up and threw open the door. She walked through her kitchen with long strides, pausing to scoop her purse up off the little phone table and dig out her keys. She came around the corner into the dining room, saying in a loud, announcing voice that brooked no argument, “I’m going to drive over to Alabama and—”
She stopped. She’d been going to finish: “—pick up Thalia. Please stay with Shelby.”
But David had come home. He’d joined her parents at the lunch table and was eating a large portion of her mother’s hot chicken salad and chopped fruit. He looked up at her as her parents did, Daddy turning around backward. David’s eyebrows lifted, listening, innocent of her intent, and she couldn’t finish. She’d avoided calling Thalia in the first place because he’d asked her to.
Mother was rising, smiling her broad, closed-lipped smile. “Wonderful!” she said. “See, I told you to go ahead and try Sissi again. I’ll just run up and have Bet pack her things.”
Laurel blinked. Mother thought she meant DeLop. When she looked around the table, she saw David and Daddy thought so, too, swept up and carried in the current of Mother’s assumption.
Laurel opened her mouth to say no, she hadn’t reached Sissi, she was going to damn Mobile to get her damn sister, and then she closed it again. David had promised to help her, but he clearly had no idea how. Daddy had come, but he was Mother’s right-hand man, not Laurel’s. And most of all, there was Mother, who would pin Laurel down with Cowslip’s blank gaze and sap her will with hot chicken salad and promises of normal days to come. Laurel couldn’t fight them all.
She shifted her gaze a hair over so she wasn’t looking Mother in the eye. Mother would see the lie there. Laurel focused on Mother’s bottom lashes, and from across the room, Thalia’s trick worked perfectly.
“Bet packed most of her things last night,” Laurel said, and her voice sounded sure and steady.
First David and then Daddy offered to drive