Before the Saturday lunch rush started, he called Sergei in to the office.
“What’s up, re?”
Nothing like owning a restaurant to inure a guy to personnel problems, but he’d gone and unearthed a hellish new twist to the process. “Sit down, will you? Shut the door.”
Sergei complied, and damn if Theo could tell if his calm reaction was a facade or genuine.
“Take a look at these reports.”
He peered for a cursory moment. “Spreadsheets aren’t my thing. This is the monthly income?”
“Right.”
“Is it down or something? Up?” Serg passed them back, looking like someone who’d never considered a balance sheet in his life. Theo added number sense to the qualities he’d search for in his next manager.
“The raw numbers are fine. But these days, where I highlighted, the cash never made it to our account.”
Sergei leaned back. As if proximity to the spreadsheet itself was the problem. “Hang on. Hang on.”
He did. He waited, like a fool trying to imitate some movie detective, letting his perp break the tension of silence.
Sergei fished out his phone and tapped between gesticulations. “I don’t know if you’re trying to ambush me on your own or if you and Ron cooked this up together. Trying to force me out so I don’t get in the way of you banging my wife. I mean, my mother’s been telling me to protect myself, and I told her, no. I said to her, come on, Theo’s more interested in Elixir running well than he is in Rachel, for god’s sake. So I shouldn’t be paranoid. But I guess it’s good I was trying to appease her, because here we are.”
Theo’s calves hurt. Of all the places to notice he was holding himself back, the calves were a strange choice, but there it was. The effort to not surge to his feet had them straining. His hand was clenched on his pen, and his jaw ground up into his molars, but it was the calves that he tried to relax first. “I’m not ambushing you, and Ron didn’t cook up anything. I’m showing you facts. The cash is missing. I’m asking if you know anything about it.”
“Of course I do.”
He shifted his jaw again. “What does that mean?”
Sergei shoved his precious cell phone his way, like it contained five thousand dollars and a reasonable explanation. “Because those are the nights you had Ron take the deposit.”
Ten days since hugging her girl goodbye. Sergei had bothered to return her texts twice, so she didn’t have any overwhelming worries about Hannah’s health or safety. Just everything else. What was she eating, was she getting all the bedtime stories she wanted, had they lost Effie and not bothered to look for her? Was she happy? What did they do when she fussed or cried?
Her neighbor joked about enjoying all her free time, when she saw Rachel standing at the mailboxes with no Hannah in tow. Said it must be nice to sleep in. And okay, yes. She was as well rested as possible for someone wrestling with her conscience. Oh, and whose body was busy diverting resources to the cell-dividing factory within. She’d been through every shelf and drawer in Hannah’s room, organizing toys to their proper bins and matching up socks and folding away outgrown clothes for storage. Also deep-cleaned the bathroom, restocked the medicine cabinet, flipped her mattress, filed all her paperwork, took herself out to a movie, and planned a five-dish meal for her friends.
The chicken was marinating, the onion was pickling, the potatoes and cauliflower were chopped and ready. The lentils in the crockpot smelled great. But if Theo called at any point, she would walk away from dinner and the gals. He only had texted her things were fine. “Complex,” he wrote, and she didn’t know how to take that. She was deciphering everything about her life from the qualities of the silences.
Serena, Natalie, and Gillian brought noise, bless them. Laughter, and chatter, and the pop of a cork from a bottle of rosé.
“None for me,” she said.
Gillian slowly set the bottle down on the table, never taking her eyes from Rachel’s face. Which was ridiculous. It’s not like she even drank that much. She’d stuck to water plenty of other times. Sure, usually those nights were the ones when she had Hannah with her, but that didn’t justify Gill’s air of suspicion.
“I haven’t even had a chance to tell him yet,” she blurted out.
So of course, then everyone stared at her. More silence surrounding her, not that it was hard to decipher.
“Rachel Elizabeth Groff, are you pregnant?”
She grimaced at Gill. It was enough of an answer. After that, silence was banished. She gave them the basics, ending with, “And I was going to tell him Friday, but something weird happened at Elixir and he had to go.”
“We haven’t even met this man. How can you be pregnant when we don’t even know what he looks like?” Natalie asked.
“Right, where’s a pic?” Serena took Rachel’s phone and navigated to the photo album. “All of these are of Hannah.”
Gillian appropriated the phone. “Why didn’t you send me this one of her in the pool? What is wrong with you?”
“Focus. We need to see this Thad person.”
“Theo,” Rachel corrected.
“Until I meet him, I’m calling him Thad,” Serena said. “Just in case.”
“In case what?” asked Nat.
“In case.” Serena followed her ominous statement with a hefty sip of wine.
“Wait. Important question.” Natalie held her hand in the air like they were in grade school. “When you rolled the dice for Thad on the game board, what did he get for sexytimes?”
“Thunder bolt,” Gillian said. Quick as can be. Not even pretending to think about it first.
Nat lowered her arm enough to high-five Gill. “Awesome recall. Thanks. And?”
Rachel glared at them both, though they knew she didn’t mean it. “And what?”
“Are we talking floodwaters? Hurricane? Gully washer?”
Serena laughed. “What even is a gully washer?”
“You know.” Natalie threw up her hands and did the same motion as ‘down came the rain’ from the Itsy Bitsy Spider song. “Quick cloudburst, lots of noise but gone before you even have time to go out and get wet.”
They all cracked up.
“I have mango and coconut sorbets for dessert and I don’t have to share,” Rachel warned.
“Wow. That’ll teach you to talk about weather patterns,” Gillian told Nat.
“Can I blame my fiancé? He’s a very bad influence.”
“Only if you tell us one of his dirty limericks.” Serena’s smile glinted.
“Hmm. I’ll think about it,” Natalie said. “Meanwhile, look at how Rachel is sitting there hoping we’ll stop asking about Thad.”
“Theo.”
“Nope. We’re all calling him Thad now. I decided. Only way to get us to stop is to tell us all about his lightning rod.”
“You people are childish.”
“Answer the question, Rachel.”
She shook her head. “I think you’re the bad influence on Evan, not the other way round. And if you must know.... Okay, those summer storms, the ones that move in right when it gets dark outside? And suddenly everything is quiet and still, but then the skies open up and the water’s everywhere, thunder and lightning hitting right on top of each other? And it’s pouring all night long, so you may as well give up hope of sleeping, and let nature have its way with you? Like that.”
All three of them reached for their wine glasses and drained them. She kinda wished she had one of her own, to be honest. That night they’d spent together before Andres came to town felt way longer than three weeks ago, with so much else happening since. And probably it was all over with her and Theo, as soon as he found out about the baby.
“Okay, we really need that picture now. And why are you looking wistful?” Gillian asked. “We’re the ones jealous of your nightly thundershowers.”
“Speak for yourself,” Serena said, and she and Natalie clinked their glasses together. Smug almost-marrieds.
Rachel passed over the wine bottle so they could refill anyway. “It’s weird to think about dry spells now, is all.”
“Why dry spells? Your doctor didn’t give you anything to worry about, did she?”
She squeezed Gill’s hand. “No, nothing like that. But I don’t see how we can go about at dating if we’re co-parenting.”
“What is this, the last season of Friends? Of course you can date the hot man who fathers your baby.”
“Jesus, Gill.”
“I hope he looks more like Joey than Ross.”
“Seconded,” Serena said. “Text him to send us a selfie so we can check.”
“Y’all should fuck right off.”
“Aw, you know you love us.” Serena’s self-assurance was well founded. And that was good. Having three such friends in her life was good. They’d never yelled at her about how much she’d screwed up by letting Sergei abuse her, and staunchly seen her through the dismal, messy end of her marriage, and stuck by her when her world revolved around things like whether Hannah was ready for solid food and if her sleep schedule would ever smooth out. And here they were, ready to go through all of it with her again. Loving her, no matter what.
“Hey.” Gill rubbed her shoulder. “Did we even say congratulations?”
The overfull water balloon of tension in her chest popped, and tears spilled all down her face. Arms reached her from all sides, hugging and tugging her up until the three of them surrounded her, held her together.
Who needed thunder clouds, when she had the steady strength of sheltering arms like these?