It lasted, as Martha had known it would, right up until Tim slammed down the phone.
“That’s disgusting!”
She would’ve liked to remind him to take better care of their things.
“Tim.” Martha turned to him, to all four of them, needing to help them with something that couldn’t be helped, but determined to try, anyway.
And needing to be alone with them. And with herself.
“It’s gross!” Tim blurted at her, his brown eyes glaring. The girls were all staring up at her, as though expecting her to make some incisive comment that would put everything into place.
She wished she could have accommodated them.
Everyone except her seemed to have forgotten the preacher standing behind her.
“Calm down for a second,” she said evenly, scrambling for a way to hold life together long enough to get rid of Marks. This was Moore business. Shelter Valley business. Not Marks business. “Why don’t you go start the car, Ellen, and we’ll go into town for some ice cream.”
It had worked when they were little.
And they’d all been glad when she’d brought home sundaes the week before.
“He’s a big fat jerk,” Tim said, standing there with his arms folded across a chest that was just beginning to take on masculine form. His glance, traveling among his sisters, landed on Ellen. “Having a baby at his age, with a girl who’s practically your age, is just plain sick!”
The words cut Martha to the quick.
Her daughters, with moist eyes and unsmiling mouths, looked lost. Broken.
Four years ago, Todd had left them high and dry—except for the checks he sent—for a girl just a couple of years older than Ellen. One of his students. At Martha’s request, he’d gone with her to see Pastor Edwards. They hadn’t even had one full visit before Todd had stated that he had no interest in patching things up with his wife. He wanted out.
Away from her.
From their kids.
Looking up, Martha caught the empathy aimed at her from the eyes of the stranger who’d come, grudgingly invited, into their midst.
For one brief second, she wanted to die.
“YOU’LL HAVE TO FORGIVE my mom,” Ellen Moore said, walking the preacher out to his car shortly after Tim’s outburst on Sunday afternoon. “She’s not usually so…unfriendly.”
Ellen couldn’t bring herself to call her mother rude. She loved her too much. And she understood.
As much as a twenty-year-old kid could understand a mother’s heartache.
“Don’t worry about it,” David Marks said. “I can see she’s an impressive woman. She’s carrying around a ton of emotional responsibility and doesn’t seem to be dropping any of it.”
The look in his eyes gave Ellen an odd sensation. One she barely recognized. It made her feel safe. Protected.
She hadn’t felt that way since her father left.
“It’s just that Mom and Dad went to Pastor Edwards for counseling. He was Mom’s last hope after she found out Dad was having an affair with one of his students.”
Ellen glanced quickly back at the house as she said the words, knowing that her mother couldn’t hear, but feeling guilty anyway. As though she were betraying her somehow.
“And then she was the one who found Pastor Edwards doing the very same thing Dad had done. She took it really hard.”
Ellen wanted the new pastor to understand. To not hate her mother. Or judge her. There wasn’t a woman in Shelter Valley who was a better person than Ellen’s mother. There wasn’t another woman more deserving of the help Pastor Marks was offering them.
And Ellen knew they needed it. Even if her mother was too hurt to figure that out.