her voice was trembling.
It wasn’t a fair question because Bet came from hell. Who wouldn’t like it in Victorianna, if DeLop was all they had for a comparison? But Laurel hadn’t come from hell. She’d come from Pace, and she’d liked it here fine, too. Loved it, even, every minute and molecule, no matter what Thalia thought. Thalia couldn’t imagine anyone being happy in a house and a life that were both so tidy, making chicken and quilts in between toting Shelby from dance to drill team. Laurel had been.
But that was when she’d thought that David loved it as well. Her good life was a thing they made up, made together, almost by accident, the same way they’d made Shelby.
If she’d left pieces out, then she’d done it for her family. She’d only been buttoning shut the ugly parts. The things she’d buried were better left that way. What would David and Shelby want with ghosts and family skeletons and her criminal relations and the ugly face of true and abject poverty in DeLop? She’d left those things buried, and good riddance. It had never occurred to her that David also left parts of himself outside of this house. Now that she’d seen him in excited conversation with a girl who was his intellectual equal, Laurel knew the pieces of him that she didn’t have weren’t awful. They might be his best and favorite things, buttoned up because she couldn’t share them.
Bet Clemmens had turned farther away, so that all Laurel could see of her face was the curve of her cheek. She said something else, softly, but Laurel couldn’t make out the words.
“What, honey?” Laurel asked, and it was as if the casual endearment undid Bet.
She turned toward Laurel, and her voice came out in a whispery rush. “I am happy here. Everything smells real good. You even smell good, like what I think them moms on Shelby’s Nick at Nite must smell like.”
It was nothing short of a declaration, naked and desperate. Bet flushed a deep wine red, and her throat moved as she swallowed. She ducked her head, not able to meet Laurel’s gaze in the wake of her words.
It shamed Laurel that she couldn’t say back to her, simply, I love you, too, kiddo.
She didn’t love Bet, and no one had a finer nose for insincerity of feeling than a DeLop kid. Laurel had never tried to love Bet, nor even thought to try, but she imagined that she could. If she spent any time at all looking at Bet like she was looking now, she could find this unexpected sweetness, this hopeful core, and come to love her back.
“We’re going to think about things, you and me, okay?” Laurel said at last, gently. “I don’t know what will happen, but there are opportunities for you that we can find. I haven’t been good enough with that. I haven’t been good enough to you, period. I’m sorry. But I promise I’m going to try and do right by you. Righter, anyway.”
Bet bobbed her head. It might have been a nod, but it was noncommittal, a wait-and-see movement. Words were cheap, and Laurel knew it would count more if she showed Bet. Over time.
“Have you seen Thalia?” Laurel asked.
“She’s in her room, doing thet yoga,” Bet said.
That was good. This morning, hollowed out and staring down at the dark spot of the knothole in her yard gone wrong, she had realized that she wanted David, this marriage, their troubled child, this life. She wanted it on almost any terms. If David left out pieces of himself, so be it. She could work with what she had of him, even if he was here mostly for Shelby’s sake. That was a starting place. She would sit him down in the soft ashes of last night until they found a way to work together. Shelby needed them both, badly. Of all the broken things, Shelby was the one that must be salvaged.
Laurel would send Thalia home as a gift, a yielding to what David needed. She would call Detective Moreno and state definitively that she’d seen Stan in the cul-de-sac the night Molly Dufresne drowned. That might be enough to get Moreno looking at him, but even if it weren’t it was the best she could do. She wanted Shelby safe and her marriage intact. Everything else was negotiable.
She turned to go downstairs, but Bet put out a hand and touched Laurel’s arm lightly, stopping her. “I’m sorry