Nothing Sacred

After the game, Tim walked through the crowd on the field, receiving slaps on the back, grinning the whole time.

Baseball was cool.

Life was cool.

Until it was just him and Mom in the car, heading home for another Saturday night at the Moore residence.

“You want to stop for burger

s?”

“Nah,” Tim told her, although, back at the field, that was all he’d been able to think about. But the girls would just bitch about the fat.

Who the hell cared about fat, anyway? Except his skinny sisters.

“We could order pizza.”

Ditto the fat. “Nah.”

“How about some ice cream, then?”

Saturday night at the ice cream shop with his mom. “No, thanks.”

Mom smiled over at him, and that look in her eyes made him feel like he was still a kid—in a good sorta way. “We need to celebrate, honey. That was your first shutout of the season.”

Yeah. And it was getting dark, too. “Chinese sounds good,” he said. There was a little place that had opened the year before, around the corner from them. Tim suggested they stop there.

“I thought you didn’t like their food.”

“Yeah,” he lied. “It’s great! Especially the egg rolls.” He hated their damn egg rolls. Hell, he hated their food, period. But they were quick.

And he wasn’t that hungry anymore, anyway. Besides, he had a stash of Doritos in his room. And a copy of Playboy that Sly had just ripped off from his old man. And if Tim got through that, there was always the Internet.

Eating chips for dinner was a helluva lot better than being out with Mom after dark. Or knowing his sisters were home by themselves. He might throw one helluva pitch, but there was only so much a fourteen-year-old kid could do against some big honkin’ guy bent on torturing his family.

Sometimes Tim really hated his dad. The bastard should be here, protecting the family, instead of leaving Tim to do it all.

THAT SECOND WEEK in March, Martha got, in total, maybe twenty-four hours of sleep. And that was restless at best. For the first time in her life, looking at herself wearing exercise shorts and a crop top in the mirror on Saturday evening, she thought she was too skinny. She’d eaten about as much as she’d slept that week.

Not that she’d let on to anyone else, but she had a knot in her stomach that seemed to be taking up whatever room had been there. And every single time she closed her eyes, her mind raced with images of a man out in the world, free to inflict further damage. A man who’d changed her daughter’s life. Who’d locked Ellen so deep inside herself, Martha wasn’t sure the girl would ever be released.

So stressed at the unfairness of it all, the helplessness, Martha had locked herself in her room right after dinner—cereal and toast tonight, since she and Tim had stopped for burgers after his game in Phoenix that afternoon. She’d thought perhaps a hot bath with chamomile bubbles, accompanied by the warm glow of a lavender-scented candle and George Winston playing in the background, would help unravel, if only for an hour or two, the tension that was giving her a permanent migraine and taking away her ability to find humor in anything.

She, who’d always been able to look at life with a touch of sarcastic amusement.

“Mom!” Martha heard her name over the sound of water draining from the tub.

Rebecca, apparently too lazy to actually walk to her mother’s closed door, was hollering at her from some other part of the house.

Which meant Martha had to go to her door, open it and poke her head out into the brightly lit hall. “Yes?”

Rebecca poked her head out of her own door several feet down the hall. “Phone.”

Martha hadn’t even heard it ring. “Thanks,” she told her youngest daughter. “Turn off the hall light, would you?” she asked before closing her door.

At least with Rebecca, Martha didn’t usually have to ask twice.

She picked up the mobile phone in her room. “Hello?”