Zachary sighed. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands and wished that she had offered him coffee or a cookie so that he could avoid fidgeting. He held his hands in his lap but wanted to move them around, to use them to illustrate his point.
“You say that you would have been happy to babysit him, but maybe Isabella didn’t feel like she could ask you. You were already doing too much for them. Or maybe she didn’t approve of your parenting methods. Kids often don’t appreciate their own parents. They think they know better.”
“I was a good mother to Isabella!”
Zachary didn’t answer for a few seconds, considering it. Had she been a good mother? Or had she done the wrong things and damaged Isabella? No one had offered any reason why Isabella was the way she was. Had she just won the genetic lottery? Or was it the result of something traumatic that had happened in her childhood? Or throughout all of her childhood? Most parents, if confronted, would admit that they had made mistakes in parenting. Maybe Isabella wouldn’t agree that Molly had been a good mother. Maybe she hadn’t been. Maybe Isabella was incapable of parenting because she hadn’t had a good example herself.
“I’m sure you were a good mother,” he reassured Molly, trying to keep her calm. “But Isabella might not think so. All children think they can do a better job than their parents.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. One that invited her to agree with him about the follies of children and admit that Isabella might not always agree with her.
“Isabella never had any complaints about the way that I took care of Declan,” Molly said sullenly. For the first time, Zachary could see another side of her. The person who wasn’t always upbeat and positive. The one who had doubts and took offense and who wasn’t the perfect example of a loving, devoted parent. A human being.
“How is Isabella as a wife?” Zachary spun the conversation in the other direction.
Molly blinked at him, disconcerted. “What do you mean, how is she as a wife?”
“Does she enjoy being married? Does she get along with Spencer? How have they made out together?”
Molly opened and closed her mouth. She tried several times to approach the question, seeing a minefield and trying to figure out how to navigate it.
“Being a wife is… hard for Isabella,” she admitted.
“I know marriage was pretty hard for me,” Zachary said. “I wasn’t a very good husband. I wish I could say that I always thought of my wife and that I did everything I could to keep our marriage going smoothly. I made a lot of mistakes. In the end… I drove her away.” That was what Bridget said, anyway. The story worked for Zachary’s purposes.
“Molly didn’t have a good example of a successful marriage growing up,” Molly said. “She never had a father, and I didn’t have any strong, long-lasting relationships when she was a girl. She was a very difficult child, and there wasn’t any space in my life for a man. She needed all my attention. A man would just have felt neglected.”
“That makes it hard. You can’t just take your example from TV.” Zachary smiled at her. “The Brady Bunch might seem perfect, but that’s not the way families really work. Husbands and wives don’t always agree. They’re not always compatible.”
Molly got up and paced across the room, stopping to retrieve the photo of Isabella, Spencer, and Declan. She sat back down with it, showed it to Zachary for a moment, and then sat staring at it.
“I thought her marrying someone else with a mental illness was a bad idea. Isabella thought it would be perfect. They would be able to understand what the other was going through. Because their tendencies were opposite, they would each… complete the other. Spencer would complete her. Would fill in the gaps.”
“But that’s not the way it worked out, is it? Spencer told me about the blue plate.”
Molly smiled softly. “She had that plate since she was a girl. She ate from it every day. She had to have it. When Spencer threw it out… I think that was the first sign that it wasn’t just going to be a bumpy ride. It was going to be a rollercoaster. Or a bungee jump. It wasn’t going to work… not the way they thought it was.”
“How did Isabella react to the difficulties with Spencer? How did she react when he did something that she didn’t like, or that interfered with her space or her routines? How did she feel when he did something like throwing out her plate?”
“It would send her into a tailspin. She’d be impossible to talk to for days. She needed her therapist on the set or needed me there to help direct her. To work things out so that she could tape the show. The network understood that she had emotional problems, but… they weren’t very understanding.”
“Her job was in jeopardy? Because of the way things were going at home?”
“No, I’m just speaking generally. They had trouble with her. Not constantly. Things went very smoothly most of the time. I just meant, when Isabella and Spencer were fighting, it spilled over into her professional life.”
Zachary pounced on the word. “Tell me about their fighting.”
“No… not fighting… not like you’re talking about. I mean disagreements. Conflicts. Nothing physical.”
“Are you sure nothing ever got physical?”
“Isabella would never have abided anyone who laid a hand on her. If Spencer had hit her, she would have called the police. I’m sure of that.”
“And what about her hitting him?”
“Her hitting him?” Molly laughed and shook her head. “She didn’t hit him. Never. She isn’t a
