Page 26 of The Delivery

Sure enough, there the girls are, spread around divans and couches, each more expensively curated than the next. Pearls glitter; jewels match ear to wrist; hairdos present with professional severity. The room is like a salon from the Roaring Twenties designed by someone obsessed with taupe. Introductions are made, Rebecca failing to keep up with the names.

“Glass of Vermentino?” Sheila asks.

Rebecca has never heard the word and does not want a drink. “No, thank you.”

One of the women, a wide-mouthed brunette says, “This is sooo much better than the Viognier.”

Rebecca scratches her shoulder, realizes she is doing it, stops. “I’m sorry,” she says, cursing herself for apologizing even as she’s doing it. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting a social gathering.”

“Oh, this isn’t social,” Sheila says.

“Well, everything we do is a bit social,” says the redhead, running manicured nails through a faux-fur throw on the divan.

“Given your concerns,” Sheila continues, “I thought I’d get all the girls together from, you know, our daughters’ group.”

Maddy does not have a group. And if she did, it certainly wouldn’t be composed of the offspring of these harpies.

“I know Maddy has been uncomfortable—”

“No,” Rebecca says, “she’s been bullied.”

“That’s one version of events,” says another woman, East Asian, severe makeup, world-class legs crossed high at the thigh beneath a micro-mini Rebecca might have been able to fit into when she was twelve. “But everyone has their own.”

“Especially girls,” the redhead chimes in. “I mean, half the stories we get are ‘She said, she said, she said.’”

“Maddy sustained a bad burn,” Rebecca says, somehow defending herself, her injured child. She admonishes herself mentally for resorting to the dramatically medical sustained.

“We understand that, sweetie, and we feel terrible about it,” the brunette says, “but everything that happens doesn’t have to be someone’s fault. I mean, they’re children. And children play.”

“Maddy was bullied into getting on that slide.”

“Bullied,” the redhead laughs, with a roll of her head.

“Yes,” Rebecca says. “Bullied.”

Sheila lays a too-thin hand on Rebecca’s arm. “I mean, can we really believe her story, what with her sensitivities and filters and . . . limitations and whatnot?”

Unprepared for a direct attack on her daughter, Rebecca is stunned into speechlessness.

“We can’t slow down a whole village to accommodate one child,” another woman says, somewhere behind Rebecca, by the leather-padded bar.

Sheila pivots in front of Rebecca, an assault of high-end perfume and aggressively sympathetic eyes: “What we’re saying is, Maddy really seems to be struggling with her mental health.”

“She’s not struggling,” Rebecca says through clenched teeth, though of course Maddy is. “She just needs to not be bullied.”

“Look, Rebecca, we’re here to talk mothers-to-mother,” Sheila says. “And we wanted to present the possibility that maybe another place could meet Maddy’s needs better.”

Rebecca realizes then that the situation is hopeless, that she is outmatched and outgunned, that she lost before she even arrived here in this adult playpen of a room. She stares at the panorama of made-up eyes, those oft-injected doll faces not quite capable of arranging themselves into expressions of human warmth. Smugness shines through the thin veneer of feigned empathy, the secret triumph of the ascendant mother.

They are more robotic than Mr. Man.

Rebecca’s face is hot, her throat constricting. But she will not give them the satisfaction of seeing her lose her composure. She turns crisply and walks out.

Behind her, voices quickly resume, a hushed murmur.

Oh my God, do you think she’s okay?

Should one of us go after her?