Everyone’s life has a little scandal in it. The seemingly innocent lady standing in line in front of you at the grocery store bounces the toddler strapped to her chest has her secrets, as she struggles to look through her purse to get the credit card to pay the cashier. She keeps her secrets. We don’t know about any of them, even in an era that’s seemingly as visible as in this social media age. We think all the secrets are out. How could anyone possibly try to hide something in this golden age of everything being out there until the end of time? But this notion that we are voluntarily under surveillance is a facade because it isn’t all out there. Not my secrets, not your secrets, not unless we want it out there. That is the key to understanding how Thelma Gaines managed to deceive everyone for so long, despite having more secrets than one should have to keep within a lifetime. And all these secrets were not hers. But they were hers to keep. And perhaps, that is why the secrets of coral springs began to unravel like a cable knit sweater caught on a rusty nail the night that her dead body was found by Molly Sandoval the curious but a little too nosy girl who lives in the basement suite next door.
“Mom!” Molly shouted as she charged out her her room, mascara wand in hand, hot rollers still in her shoulder-length jet black hair. “Mom!” She yelled again with again no response. She was going to lose it. Pete the cat knocked her phone off the charging pad again leaving the battery dead, leading her to again miss the seven o’clock alarm waking her up in time for work. “Mother! Are you there?!”
“Jesus, yes Molly!” She heard her mother call from upstairs.
“Pete snuck down here again last night and messed with my phone. I’m going to be late again. Can you give me a ride to school?”
These are not the words a mom wants to hear from her 30-year-old daughter who gave up a career as a lucrative travel nurse to pursue a degree in pottery at the local college of art. “How did I get so lucky to have my superstar baby girl who graduated high school at 16, into medical school at 20 and decided to give it up at 23 to become a travel nurse, and then gave that up to make fancy plates and live in my basement suite at 30?” replied her mother with brutal sarcasm.
“I don’t know mother. How did I end up being so lucky at 30 to have a mother who won’t stop reminding me of what a disappointment I am compared to her three other superstar siblings?” Molly quipped back. This was the ever-present tone of their relationship, Molly making decisions her mother didn’t agree with and her mother reminding her of how much she didn’t agree every chance she got. She was both the superstar and the eldest of the Sandoval four. When she graduated from high school a year early she got accepted into the University of Toronto and finished a psychology degree at the top of her class before getting into medical school at 20. Her mother was so proud, the first doctor of the family. Her mother nearly had a stroke the day Molly told her in her second last year of med school that she wasn’t going to do her residency because medicine didn’t click with her values.
