herself providing for three kids on a minimum-wage, single-mother salary, but I do. I remember her constant exhaustion, the way her worries—about money, about what people were saying about our jailbird father, about how the gossip would affect me and Camille and Duke—filled my stomach with something sour and itchy. I remember the sound of her tears when she thought I wasn’t listening, how they boiled inside me into a white-hot rage. When Dad died in prison, she lined us up along the grave site and ordered me to look sad, even though I detested the man, even though I’m pretty sure by then she detested him herself. “He’s your father,” Ma said, smacking me on the back of the head. Family.
“I am holding us together,” I tell her now. “Or at least, I’m trying to. But I can’t do that when I’m standing here, arguing with you.”
“Does this ‘retreat’—” she uses air quotes and pursed lips to let me know what she thinks of the word “—have anything to do with what happened at Easter?”
I wince, wishing to all hell that she hadn’t brought it up. I don’t know how else to explain that it was nothing, the product of too many of us crammed into her tiny kitchen. I tossed Emma a pack of napkins, but all she saw was something coming at her head. She let out a scream so bloodcurdling, it froze everybody’s shoes to the linoleum.
We all tried really hard to laugh it off, especially Emma, but I saw the way Ma looked at us after that. Like she was worried.
Like she’s looking at me now.
“Ma, I told you, that was nothing. Em just...thought she saw something that wasn’t there. That’s all.”
She watches me carefully, her expression hard. “And what were all those papers on the kitchen table?”
“Work. I’m in the middle of a missing-person investigation, remember? I’ve been working 24-7.”
“What do hundreds of Emma’s emails have to do with the search for Sabine Hardison?”
Her question tightens around my chest, pushing into my lungs and expanding, sucking up all the air. I need to get Ma out of here. I need her to leave. The last thing I need is for my mother to be butting into my case.
“Maybe nothing, but maybe everything. Sabine showed us a house last year, and she sent Emma a list of people to work with. Inspectors, lenders, things like that. I need to find that list, and I need to talk to those people. They might know something about Sabine.”
“Why don’t you ask Emma where the list is?”
“Because I’m not allowed to talk to her. The doctors won’t let me. Not until she’s done with the whole program.”
“And when will that be?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Ma doesn’t say anything for a really long time. She looks at me, and I look at her, and the longer this staredown drags on, the more my skin turns cold and clammy. Emma has a good life. She lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, goes to nice restaurants and parties, all things I provide for her. It’s more than my deadbeat father ever did for Ma and us kids, and yet there’s a hurricane whipping up in my gut at the look on Ma’s face. I turned thirty-six last month, and my mother can still do this to me.
“I’ll take care of it, Ma. I swear to God. I’m taking care of it.”
She presses her palms to either side of my face and shakes her head. “You go. Clean up this mess you made. I’ll clean up the one here.”
BETH
“Hey.”
I jump at the man’s voice, and the papers slip from the stack between my fingers, hitting the table and scattering. First Martina, now Erwin Four. It’s like visiting hour in here, a revolving door of people coming and going. He stands in the same spot his father did less than an hour ago, looking like he just came from the mall, or maybe a visit with his tailor. The creases in his shirt are knife-sharp, his belt buckle so shiny I can see my own reflection.
“You scared me.”
“I noticed.” He comes into the room uninvited, dipping his chin at the piles on the table. “New-member bags, huh? Looks like fun.”
I gather up the papers I dropped, shuffle them into a neat pile. “Are you looking for your father? Because he went to visit a sick parishioner.”
“Mrs. McPherson, I know. Charlene told me.” He wanders over, looking over the stacks of papers