My son-in-law walked his girlfriend up the aisle at my pregnant daughter’s service and sat her in my place, and when I told him to move her he said, “Ariel doesn’t need a chair anymore, Lourdes, but Brittany does.” He’d already filed the claim on her $400,000 policy. Then a woman in the back pew stood up holding a folder.
Ariel was twenty-nine, and thirty-one weeks along with a girl she’d already named after my mother.
Fifteen days earlier, Devin had called us at 9:40 on a Thursday night.
He said she slipped on the back porch steps carrying a basket of laundry while he was at his brother’s watching the game.
Ariel did laundry on SUNDAYS.
She’d done it on Sundays since she was fourteen and I told her she was old enough to wash her own jeans.
I said that to the detective. He wrote it in his little pad and nobody ever called me back.
And I knew who Brittany was before Devin ever brought her through those doors.
At Easter, Ariel slid her phone across my kitchen table between the ham and the rolls.
“Mom, who’s B Kwok?” she said.
It was their joint checking account.
Devin had sent B Kwok $650 three months running, and the note on every payment said “rent lol.”
Ariel laughed when she showed me.
She laughed wrong.
So I knew exactly who was hanging onto his sleeve when they came in.
Long pink nails. Hair down to the middle of her back, blonder than anything God gave her.
Sunglasses pushed up on her head. INSIDE a church.
Devin wore the navy suit he got married in.
People turned around in the pews one at a time, the way you look when somebody drops a tray at a restaurant and you don’t want to be the first.
He walked her right up to the first pew. OUR pew.
I’d gone up to straighten the ribbon on the flowers, and when I turned around Brittany was in my spot and my purse was on the floor.
My sister Tonya had slid all the way down to the end to get away from her perfume.
I said, “Devin, she’s not sitting there.”
That’s when he said the thing about the chair.
He said it at a normal volume, like he was telling somebody where to park.
Ramon took my hand and walked me back to the second row.
“Not today, Lou,” he said. “She’d hate a scene.”
So I sat behind my own daughter like a neighbor from down the street.
Father Marcus talked about Ariel’s second graders.
They’d made a paper chain in October, one link for every day until the baby came, and somebody had laid what was left of it across the casket. Sixty-one links.
Behind me, old Hubert from the parish council had a hearing aid that whistled every time the organ went high.
Brittany rested her head on Devin’s shoulder for the second reading.
Devin kept his phone face down on his knee and flipped it over every couple of minutes.
Ramon’s hand on mine was shaking.
Ramon set tile for thirty-eight years. His hands don’t shake.
At the end, before Father Marcus could give the blessing, Devin got up and went to the lectern.
He thanked everyone for coming.
He said there’d be food at the house after, and that Brittany had “been a rock” and made most of it herself.
Then he said, “I’m listing the house after the holidays, so if anybody wants something of Ariel’s, come by this week.”
Like a garage sale.
The nursery was still yellow.
The crib was still in its box in the hallway because he never got around to putting it together.
Tonya put her hand flat on my back and kept it there.
That’s when the woman in the back pew stood up.
Gray coat, short gray hair, reading glasses on a cord. I’d taken her for somebody from Ariel’s school.
She came up the middle with a blue folder under her arm, and she didn’t hurry.
“Excuse me, Father,” she said. “I’m Kathleen Shea, and I represented Ariel.”
Devin laughed. Right there at the lectern.
“Ariel didn’t have a lawyer,” he said.
“She did since August,” Kathleen said. “She came to my office four times, and you were at work for every one.”
Brittany sat up and pulled her sunglasses down off her head.
“She left instructions for today,” Kathleen said. “Here, with her mother and father in the room.”
“Her words were, if anything happens to me before the baby comes, do it at the funeral.”
“This is a church,” Devin said. “Show some respect.”
Ramon stood up next to me.
He’s sixty-five with a bad hip, and in forty years of marriage I’d never heard him raise his voice at Mass.
“YOU DON’T GET TO SAY RESPECT, DEVIN,” he said.
Nobody moved.
Kathleen opened the folder on the end of the first pew, right by Tonya’s knee.
There was one typed page with a signature, and under it four sheets of the lined paper Ariel wrote her lesson plans on.
I knew that handwriting from twenty feet away.
“The typed one first,” Kathleen said. “It’s a change of beneficiary on Ariel’s life insurance, signed September ninth.”
Devin put both hands on the lectern.
“She couldn’t have,” he said. “I’d have gotten a letter.”
“The letters went to my office,” Kathleen said. “She asked for that too.”
Then she set the typed page down and picked up the handwritten ones.
“Ariel wanted this read word for word,” she said.
She put her glasses on.
“If Kathleen is reading this in church, then I didn’t fall,” she read.
Devin came down off the step.
Brittany said, “Dev, sit down,” and grabbed at his jacket, and he jerked it out of her hand.
Kathleen didn’t look up.
She turned to the second page and read the name at the top of it to herself first.
Then she looked straight at Brittany.
“This part,” she said, “is for you.”
The second sheet
Kathleen held the page up so the light from the side windows hit it, and she read it in the same flat voice she’d used for the first line.
“Brittany. I don’t know you, and I’m done being mad at you. He told me Thursdays were his brother’s. If I’m gone and it happened on a Thursday, you’re the only one who knows what time he left your place. Please tell my mother. She’ll believe you. She always believes me.”
That was the whole page. Ariel wrote big when she was upset. It took up all the lines.
Brittany’s sunglasses were in her lap. She looked down at them.
Devin was in the aisle now, three steps from the folder.
“This is sick,” he said. “Somebody take that away from her.”
Nobody did.
My purse was still on the floor of the first pew where Brittany had knocked it. I leaned over the back of the pew, past Tonya’s shoulder, and got it by the strap. The zipper was open. My keys and my rosary and a pack of Kleenex were still in it, and a Werther’s that had come out of the wrapper.
I put it on my knees and held it with both hands.
Brittany turned around then. She looked at me over the back of the pew, about two feet from my face. Her mascara was perfect. She hadn’t cried once the whole Mass.
“He was at his brother’s,” she said. “Right, Dev?”
The G
Ariel signed her name with a G in the middle.
At Easter, after she put the phone with B Kwok on it back in her purse, she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She wanted me to look at a form instead.
It was the life insurance through the school district. One hundred thousand dollars, the basic one every teacher gets. She’d written “Baby Girl Pruett” on the beneficiary line and crossed it out, because you can’t put somebody who isn’t born yet, and written Devin.
She signed it at my table, with my pen. Ariel G. Pruett.
She’d done it that way since the wedding. When she filled out the marriage license she said, “So you don’t think I forgot you, Mom,” and I told her I’d never think that, and she put the G in anyway. On the license, the mortgage, every Christmas card after. Guzman.
Devin came in off the porch, where he’d been on his phone through the whole ham. He kissed my cheek.
Four years married to my daughter, and he called me Lourdes every single time. Like a man at the bank.
He looked at the form over her shoulder.
“A hundred grand,” he said. “That’s what the district thinks you’re worth?”
“Thursdays you’re at Jeremy’s,” Ariel said. She said it to the form, not to him. I thought she was changing the subject.
He said, “Every Thursday, babe,” and took a roll off the plate.
After she died, the detective sat on my couch for twenty minutes. I told him about Sundays and the jeans. He wrote it down. He said Devin’s brother had already given a statement about the game, and that pregnant women in their third trimester fall a lot, ma’am, it’s balance.
He gave me his card with his cell number written on the back in pen.
“Anything else, you call me direct,” he said.
I put it in the zipper pocket inside my purse. I called that cell twice. He didn’t call back either time.
Now Brittany was asking Devin a question in a church, and Devin wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking past her, at his brother in the third pew across the way. Would Jeremy lie for him twice?
Jeremy
“Ask Jeremy,” Devin said. “Jer. Tell her.”
Jeremy is two years younger than Devin and about forty pounds heavier, and his wife had her arm through his like she was keeping him in the pew.
He stood up anyway.
“He was with me, Mrs. Guzman,” he said. “Six-thirty till almost ten. I told the police. I told you at the house.”
He had told me at the house. He’d said it holding a plate of my enchiladas.
Father Marcus came down off the altar with his hands out, like we were kids in the parking lot.
“Maybe the family would like to use the sacristy,” he said. “Kathleen, could this wait until after the committal?”
“She asked for it here,” Kathleen said.
I should have kept my mouth shut. Ramon had asked me to. Instead I stood up with my purse against my stomach and said it to the whole church.
“She did laundry on Sundays.”
It came out too loud. My face got hot.
Devin turned all the way around so everybody could see him smile at me. It was a sad smile. He’d been practicing it for two weeks.
“She was nesting, Lourdes,” he said. “She was washing baby clothes. Pregnant women do that. Everybody here who’s had a kid knows that.”
Somebody on the left side said, “That’s true.” A woman I didn’t know nodded at me like I was the one who needed help.
I sat back down.
Tonya didn’t. She leaned forward past Brittany and spoke straight to Devin.
“What baby clothes?” she said. “The crib’s still in the box. You said so yourself. There wasn’t a onesie in that house that wasn’t in a gift bag.”
Devin said, “Tonya, this isn’t about you.”
Then he went back to the folder, and he put his hand on top of it.
Kathleen didn’t pull it away. She lifted his fingers off it, one at a time, the way you’d take something from a toddler.
“Then let’s go back to page one,” she said.
July twelfth
She read the whole first page this time, start to finish.
“If Kathleen is reading this in church, then I didn’t fall. In August a letter came to the house from the district insurance. It said my coverage was raised to four hundred thousand, effective July twelfth, as I requested. I didn’t request anything. On July twelfth I was at summer training in Colorado Springs and Devin was home by himself. They sent me a copy of the form. Look at the signature. I haven’t signed my name without the G since the day I got married. Ask my mother.”
Kathleen took a sheet out of the back of the folder. A photocopy, a little gray. She held it out over the end of the pew so I could see it.
Ariel Pruett.
No G.
The letters were rounder than hers, too, the way somebody writes when they’re trying.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. Ramon had seen it, and he made a sound in his throat I’d heard once, the day his father died.
“Anybody can leave off a letter,” Devin said. “She was pregnant, she was tired, she signed a hundred things.”
“She didn’t,” Ramon said.
Kathleen kept reading.
“So I went to Kathleen and moved the policy to my mom and dad, and I had the mail sent to her. I’m not telling anybody yet because I don’t have anything but a missing letter, and he’d say I was crazy, and they’d believe him. He’s good at that.
“He’s going to bring her. He brings her places he thinks nobody who knows me will notice. Let him. Mom, I know you. Don’t make a scene until Kathleen’s done. I need her in the room.”
Tonya’s hand came off my back.
I looked at the back of Brittany’s head. All that hair. Sitting in my seat, where Ariel had wanted her the whole time.
Devin said, “This is a dead woman’s paranoia. That’s all it is.”
His phone was in his hand now, not on his knee. His thumbs were going.
Brittany opened her little black purse, took her own phone out, and started scrolling up with one long pink nail.
8:12
“Britt,” Devin said. “Put that away.”
She didn’t look at him. She kept scrolling. She went past a lot of things, hearts and pictures of food and a video of a dog, back and back, fifteen days.
Then she stopped and turned around and held it over the back of the pew to me.
She didn’t say anything. She just held it out, the way Ariel slid hers across my table at Easter.
I took it.
The thread said Dev at the top, with a red heart after it.
Thursday 8:12 PM
leaving. shes doing laundry tonight. dont text me ill call u after
Under it, from Brittany, at 10:51:
u ok?? u said ud call
And under that, from Devin, at 11:30:
something happened. cant talk. delete this
She hadn’t deleted it.
I read “doing laundry” three times. On a Thursday. An hour and a half before he called us crying at 9:40 and said she’d slipped while he was at his brother’s.
He knew she’d be carrying laundry before she ever picked up the basket.
I handed the phone to Ramon. He held it far out from his face, because his reading glasses were in the car.
“Six-thirty till almost ten,” Ramon said, to nobody. He was looking at Jeremy.
Jeremy sat down.
Brittany said, “You told me you were going home. You told me she’d be downstairs and you’d call me after she went to bed.” She said it to the floor. “You said it like it was a schedule.”
“Britt, you are confused,” Devin said. “You’re upset, you don’t know what you’re reading.”
The phone buzzed in Ramon’s hand.
A new message slid down over the top of the thread.
Dev: give it back right now and delete it
The zipper pocket
Devin came for the phone.
He got to the end of our pew and Ramon stepped out of the pew ahead of him, bad hip and all, and held the phone behind his back like a kid with a candy bar.
Devin stopped. There were two hundred people watching him. He wasn’t going to put his hands on a sixty-five-year-old man in front of the whole parish, and he knew it.
So he talked.
“That’s her property. That’s harassment. You can’t take somebody’s phone in a church, Ramon, that’s a crime, there’s actual laws. I texted her I was leaving Jeremy’s, okay, I was leaving JEREMY’S, and I said she was doing laundry because she SAID she was gonna do laundry, she called me, she said she wanted to get the towels done before the baby. Ask anybody. Ask the phone company.”
“Okay,” Kathleen said. “We’ll ask the phone company.”
“You want to know something?” he said. He was looking at me now. “You want to know what your perfect daughter said to me on Labor Day? She said she was taking the house. The house and the baby and going to live with you. And I’m supposed to pay your family every month for the next eighteen years? While she sits in your kitchen telling you what a piece of shit I am?”
He’d never sworn in front of me before. Four years.
Then he turned on Brittany.
“And you. Don’t look at me like that. You’re six-fifty a month. That’s what you are. You’re rent.”
Brittany didn’t say anything. She put her sunglasses back on, inside the church.
I unzipped the inside pocket of my purse.
The card was there, soft at the corners from me taking it out and putting it back. I turned it over to the pen side and dialed it on my own phone, on my feet in the second row with Tonya pressed against my hip.
It rang four times. I thought it was going to voicemail like before.
“Detective,” he said.
“This is Lourdes Guzman,” I said. “Sundays. You wrote it down.”
There was a pause. I could hear a radio behind him.
“Mrs. Guzman. I’m sorry, I meant to call you back.”
“There’s a woman here with a text from my son-in-law at 8:12 that Thursday.”
I held my phone out to Brittany.
She looked at it for a long time. Long enough that Devin said, “Don’t you DARE,” and Father Marcus said, “Devin, that’s enough,” and it was the first thing Father Marcus had said all day that I agreed with.
Brittany took my phone.
“He left my apartment on Elm at eight-ten,” she said. “He told me she’d be doing laundry.”
The detective talked to her for a while. She said yes and no and the address again. Then she handed it back to me.
“Nobody touches that phone,” he told me. “Nobody leaves. I’ve got a car about twelve minutes out and I’m coming myself.”
Jeremy and his wife went out the side door by the confessionals. Nobody stopped them. They didn’t come back.
Devin sat down on the altar step, in his wedding suit, and put his face in his hands.
The funeral director came up the side aisle and bent down next to Father Marcus. I heard him. The cemetery couldn’t hold the slot past one o’clock. The hearse had been running in the lot for forty minutes.
Kathleen picked up the last two sheets from the folder and put them in my lap, on top of my purse.
“Three and four are for you and Ramon,” she said. “She didn’t want them read out loud.”
Ramon looked at the casket. Then at me. He still had Brittany’s phone behind his back.
The detective had said nobody leaves. Somebody had to stay here with that girl and that phone, and it was going to be me.
I took the phone out of Ramon’s hand.
“Go with her,” I told him. “I’ll sit with this one.”
The Sunday after
I did a load of laundry this morning. Sunday.
It was Ariel’s. I went by the house that week like Devin told everybody to, with Tonya and Tonya’s van. We took the hamper out of the bedroom and the crib, still in its box, and the yellow curtains off the nursery window. Nobody stopped us. There wasn’t anybody there to.
Devin has been in county since Tuesday.
The detective called me back this time. He called twice.
Jeremy went in on Monday with a lawyer and changed his statement. Brittany gave hers at the station that same afternoon, in a little room with a vending machine, while I sat on the other side of the table and held her phone in a plastic bag. I was in that room when they lowered my daughter into the ground.
Ramon said the paper chain went down with her, laid across the top. Sixty-one links. He said Father Marcus finally gave the blessing at the grave, and it was short, and that the wind blew one of the roses off and he went and picked it up.
He has the rose in a glass on his workbench. I haven’t asked to see it.
Kathleen says the money is frozen until the case is done. Ramon says he doesn’t want it. I said we’ll see.
Pages three and four are in my nightstand. I’ve read them more times than I’m going to say. The last line on page four is, Make Dad put the crib together, he’s the only one who reads directions.
The crib is in our garage. He hasn’t opened the box yet.
At eleven we went to Mass, the three of us, Ramon and Tonya and me.
The first pew was empty when we got there.
I went in first. I set my purse down on the seat beside me, and I kept my hand on it.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s ever told a detective something small and waited for a phone call.
For more family betrayals and buried truths, read the story of a bounced loan letter that arrived at the door and the wife told to let her husband’s brother handle the paperwork. For a different kind of tense family drama, follow the rider who’d spent eleven years in his brother-in-law’s shadow.
