That was straight-up bitchy, but I let it slide with a warning look because Peyton was already off to go get the whatever-it-was. The fight had been derailed.
I felt a sense of relief that was larger than the moment warranted, as if I’d stepped in and diverted a tempest. I shook my head. It was that awful dream. It still felt like a portentous one. The witch’s gaze had been so avid. I felt more than I thought, Something bad is coming for us.
I shook the little voice warning of doom away. My mother owned it. The voice in her own head must be a stentor. My father by all reports had been a piece of work. I’d never met him, and I was grateful, considering. He was the reason she wouldn’t get on an elevator with any man. Not alone. She kept a loaded handgun in a safe by her bed and was always gifting me pepper sprays and safety whistles. I had never once wondered where Peyton came by her anxiety, but I didn’t live like that. I refused to see the world that way. And I wasn’t going to borrow trouble when I was facing a week of single-parenting two hormone-crazed middle-school girls and a baby.
Anna-Claire stomped down the stairs to the first landing and cocked her hip at me. “Remember you’re a snack mom for rehearsal this afternoon.”
“I know.” Robert let out that last, sneaky burp. It was a whopper.
“Don’t bring bananas,” Anna-Claire said. “Cara’s dad always brings those gross generic fruit-snack things, so you need to bring something edible.”
I kept my smile in place, but it went a little stiff when I heard that Marshall Chase was the other “snack mom.” They really called it that, as if male parents were incapable of passing out raisin boxes and bottled waters. To be fair, he was the only dad I’d ever seen do it. Marshall was tall and lanky and attractive; the other moms made jokes about him being the snack, but a couple of months back, when Grease, Junior was cast, Anna-Claire got the alto lead. His own daughter got Marty. It was a good part with a solo, but it wasn’t Rizzo. I hadn’t ever thought of Marshall as the stage-parent type, but there was no denying that the balmy air between us had gone cool.
I hated it; Marshall and I had both grown up way out in Hurd County, Georgia. His wife, Betsy, had lived across the street from me. She’d been my best friend since before I had concrete memory. She and Marshall dated for most of high school, but they’d broken up when Betsy and I moved into Atlanta to attend Georgia State. Betsy had always been wilder than me, bolder, both more reckless and more fun. By the end of freshman year, she lost her scholarship, and she wasn’t even sorry. She went home, got a job, got back with Marshall. They’d gone through the police academy together and gotten married.
Our lives had forked, but Betsy and I had stayed close. We’d been each other’s maids of honor, and we’d been pregnant together; Cara was born a month before Anna-Claire. I’d always liked Marshall, though in that best-friend’s-husband way that rendered him more Ken doll than man.
When Betsy died in the line of duty, five years back, he’d wanted to move to a safer job, for Cara’s sake. Trey had hired him as an investigator. The firm had been thrilled to get him. Marshall was excellent; he’d been one of the youngest cops ever to make detective in Atlanta.
Last year Cara’s public school lost its arts funding. No more chorus or drama club, and Cara was distraught. Trey put in a word at St. Alban’s, and they’d offered her a scholarship. I’d hoped she and Anna-Claire would bond, like a mini me-and-Betsy, because Anna-Claire was also hip-deep into musical theatre and choir. Instead they were competitors, always up for the same parts and solos.
I couldn’t make them love each other, but I could threaten my too-pretty, too-popular daughter with phoneless exile and unending extra chores if she did one single thing to make Cara feel picked on or unwelcome. Cara had quickly found her own friend set, and her grades were excellent, so I considered the transfer a success. For her.
I’d hoped it would finally give me a real friend at the school. I had more in common with Marshall than with