You Will Know Me(50)

“Worry about your own daughter,” Katie said, her eyes catching sight of Gwen’s car, the top of a girl’s buttercup head inside. “Who’s apparently imprisoned in your car like an overheated collie.”

Gwen sighed. “We got in some extra practice time today. She keeps saying to me, ‘Mom, I love gymnastics.’ But I tell her, ‘Just because you love it doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. You have to put the hours in. There’s a whole gym out there of girls who love it and are useless at it.’”

“But why is she in the car, Gwen?”

“It’s hard enough to get her to practice without dosing her with scarlet fever too. And, circling back, Katie, to your question about why I’m here. I thought I’d extend the invitation to have Devon stay at my house a few nights. Until the quarantine has passed.”

“There’s no quarantine. He’s on antibiotics. He’ll be fine.”

“Katie, I know I’m prone to hyperbole. Or so my ex-husband said while he was raping me in the divorce proceedings. But, really, who gets scarlet fever these days? Between whatever criminal derangement has overtaken Hailey and the pestilence under your own roof…well, it’s getting pretty Greek here, isn’t it?”

Katie took a long, long breath.

I wish I had your balls, she once overheard a bourbon-brewed Jim Chu say to Gwen at a booster party, shooting pool. Gwen had smiled, rolling the eight ball between her fingers.

“I appreciate your concern,” Katie said, lifting the laundry bag, trying to signal an end to things, “but I’m not letting Devon out of my sight again.”

“Of course,” Gwen said, rising. “It’s a mother’s decision. Eric thought it was a good idea, but what do fathers know?”

“You two already talked about it?” Katie felt the bag slide off her narrow, toneless shoulder and catch in the cradle of her bent arm.

“He said he’d have to talk to you, but he’s up there now, helping her pack.”



Feet pounding up the stairs, laundry sack swinging wildly from her forearm, Katie called out both their names.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, pushing open the door to Devon’s room.

Both of them, backs to her, were leaning over Devon’s duffel bag.

When they turned around, their faces seemed to blur before her eyes, same deep-set eyes, same hewn cheekbones. The same grave expressions.

“Mom,” Devon said, hand out as if to calm her, “I need to go. Mrs. Weaver said the bacteria lives for up to eight days, maybe longer. She called a specialist.”

“Not with antibiotics,” Katie said, voice cresting. She knew Gwen could hear her, everyone could. “You are staying in this house with your parents and your sick brother. Have you even ducked your head in there? Have you even asked him how he is?”

“But Mom,” Devon said, her hands shaking slightly, her fingers wrapping around her wrists like just before a vault run. “Dad set it all up. It’s the right thing.”

Katie looked at Eric, who didn’t say a word.



Their bedroom door shut, Eric began talking quietly, fervently.

About how Gwen would escort Devon to and from practice with Lacey, and that not only was the Weaver house germ-free, it had a full workout room with a beam, a bar trainer, even a vault table. Devon could practice around the clock if she wanted—see? Gwen could take care of Devon, and they could take care of Drew.

“It’s not just about Devon,” he added, husky-voiced. “It could spread through the whole squad. All those girls who are counting on doing their best next month. And it’s only for a few days.”

“We need her here, Eric,” she said. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see her on the floor of that locker room.”

“Gwen’s house has a security system. It’s wired for everything—fire, carbon monoxide. It can even tell if someone opens the medicine cabinet.”

“I don’t give a goddamn if it’s land-mine-tripped from basement to roof, Eric. She belongs with her family. She belongs with her mom and dad.”

Her voice sounded high and childlike. Once, in the grocery store, piling the cart with energy bars and string cheese and a tilting stack of frozen dinners, when the woman came inside and said, Whoever owns the blue Ford, you shouldn’t leave your child in the car like that, and she’d forgotten Drew, six months old and strapped in the car seat for close to a half hour and Katie crying the whole way home and so tired she snapped the wheel too hard on the final turn, hit a guardrail. What will Eric say, what will he say? But he’d said nothing.

And then the fear spinning inside: What would he have said if that had been Devon?

He would never say anything, though. He never did. But did he stow it away? Did they both have their little storage lockers of parental missteps and near catastrophes?

“Katie,” he said now, with a hollow look in his eyes that rattled her, “this is the best thing. If something happened to Devon, you’d never forgive yourself.”



It ended with the slamming of doors, and Katie shouting like she hadn’t since she was a teenager, a hoarse and howling thing.

Eric kept shaking his head, shaking his head, his face white, eyes like two pinholes.

“What makes you think you know better?” she finally asked, voice shredded. “You?”