Page 1 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

CHAPTER

1

August 10th

1:36PM

THERE IS NOsign welcoming you to Annesville. Blink and you miss it. The town begs you to forget it before you arrive.

Other tiny towns scattered across the Midwest comfort travelers with vestiges of a livelier past, like hollowed-out car factories, grain silos rusted from disuse, tracts of houses foreclosed upon during the recession. Annesville offers no such fragments of nostalgia. There are no restaurants, no parks, no schools, no doctors. Instead, there are three liquor stores lined up along the main road like unfelled dominoes, undistinguishable from one another but for the sun-faded signs in their windows, along with an abandoned gas station, a barber shop, and a mechanic’s garage. The post office closed unceremoniously when I was fourteen. An errand as simple as a gallon of milk requires a fifteen-mile drive north to the Long Grass reservation, just over the South Dakota border, or south to the town of Tyre. On every side, Annesville is flanked by endless beige prairie. We are in the Nebraska sandhills. No crops can grow here. God himself has salted this earth.

Five unpaved side streets branch from the main road like tributaries from their mother river. In a town of ninety-some people, there are no city services to plow the snow or collect the leaves or clean up the odd gutty mess of roadkill, which is often left to suppurate in the sun for weeks before someone is finally repulsed enough by the stench to scrape the decaying creature from the dirt. The lots are large, no fences between neighbors, the excess spaces filled with trucks, trailers, RVs, and even a handful of tiny fishing boats for catching walleye down at the Twin Lakes. Houses range from rundown to dilapidated. Rusted swing sets and knee-high grass decorate the front yards, along with a few signs urging voters to reelect the local congresswoman. Everyone has an American flag. Most people have a Gadsden flag.

In Annesville, no one moves away. People die and pass along their house to children who will also die there, a cycle spanning generations. My family is no different. We are the fourth generation of Byrds to live in the saltbox house on Cedar Street—or I suppose I should saytheyare the fourth generation of Byrds to live there. It hasn’t been my home in thirteen years.

In the paper on my dashboard, beneath a bold red title that readsMISSING, is the reason I have returned: my mother. The bullet points beneath her picture—shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, five-feet-four, one hundred and ten pounds, birthmark above left eyebrow—suggest a softer, prettier woman than the one pictured. She is all sharp angles and unforgiving edges, her features carved from marble, her nose thin and severe like a blade. The hollows beneath her eyes are deep enough to catch rainwater. She looks older her forty-seven years. She was last seen leaving the women’s Bible study on Thursday night, three days ago. The bottom of the page implores anyone with information about the whereabouts of Elissa Byrd to call the Tillman County Sheriff’s Department.

The saltbox house is frozen in time. I drive by with my head ducked, in case my Missouri plates attract undue attention. I oncepeeled swaths of blue paint from the same siding, reclined on the same lopsided porch swing, fled from snakes in the same overgrown grass. We always had a problem with eastern racers. They’re as fast as their name suggests, long enough to rear up and peek their slender black heads above the grass. Fuel for nightmares. One even slithered into my bed once.

I drive to the southern edge of town, where the church cowers from the liquor stores to apologize for their indecency. The church is the closest thing Annesville has to entertainment, though it can only scrape together services on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. While every other building languishes in disrepair, the church is pristine. The empty bell tower reaches for the sky above stained glass windows. Behind the church, across a manicured lawn, are small portable classrooms for Sunday school and weekly Bible reading groups segregated by gender.

My sisters and I never missed a service growing up, not because we were devout, but because our father would berate us to the point of tears if we objected. Once or twice, when I was old enough to be properly punished for my insolence, he cracked me across the face. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The services imparted me with little spiritual guidance, only an encyclopedic recall of Bible verses I carry with me to this day. Most of them are from Leviticus.

If anyone curses his mother or father, he must be put to death.

When I pass the church, I notice an older man in a bathrobe milling around the parking lot. I dismiss it as a local drunk until I recognize the gleam of a prosthetic leg.

“Mr. Crawford?” I call from the car. He doesn’t look at me, and the cold shoulder takes me aback. Gil Crawford is the only person who ever visited me in prison. He made the six-hour drive to York twice a year, once for my birthday in May and thenthe day after Christmas, always with a small stack of books as a gift. He sent me twenty dollars every month too. It was the difference between washing my hair with bar soap or with shampoo.

To everyone else in Annesville, I am persona non grata. But not to Gil Crawford—or, at least, I shouldn’t be. Our contact since my release has been fleeting. I’ve been too busy surviving from one day to the next to maintain a close relationship. Perhaps I’ve spurned him without intending to.

I step out of the car and say his name again. The midafternoon sun blazes white above the prairie. Gil’s hands cup into a visor over his eyes as he gazes into the distance. When I tap him on the shoulder, he jumps. His hair has turned white and his face sags with age like a bloodhound, but his enormous bell pepper nose remains comfortingly familiar.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Crawford, I—”

“Connor isn’t here,” he says. “He has baseball practice.”

My mouth gapes, unable to form words, as if I’ve been lobotomized. All I can manage is, “What?”

“Coach Romanoff is pushing them hard. They need it. That team from Scottsbluff is a real juggernaut.”

It dawns on me then. The bathrobe alone should have tipped me off. Is it Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Was it not enough for him to lose a leg in Iraq and a wife to cancer? Life does not dole out suffering in equal rations, but knowing that makes the capriciousness of the universe no less painful. Gil pulls on the loops of his robe belt and tucks his hands into his pockets, his face angled toward the sun again with a serene smile, like a cat sunning itself in a patch of grass.

“Coach Romanoff canceled practice today.” I stand close to Gil and weave my arm through his. He accepts the gesture, sighing deeply. He must remember me. He must know it’s me. He’s telling me about his son, my dearest childhood friend. He must know who I am. I want to tug on his hand and beg forreassurance.Remember me? Remember me?Like when I was a little girl, starved for affection.Please remember me.

“He never cancels.”

“His appendix burst.” That the lie is necessary does not ease my discomfort in telling it.

“I asked him to work on barehand throws with you. You have a hell of an arm, Providence, but you lose too much time collecting the ball on the throw to first.” Gil makes my name sound lighter and airier than it has any right to be, its three syllables beautiful instead of cumbersome.

“My father says off-balance throws are amateur hour.” If I threw without my feet set when we practiced together, an affair often stretching deep into the night, my father would pelt me with a softball right between the shoulders. The welts would sometimes be bigger than the ball itself.Don’t play like a fucking girl.

Gil laughs. “There’s a reason your father never got a scholarship to play ball.”

“Why don’t we go find Connor? Maybe he can practice with us too.”

He blinks hard, skimming the surface of lucidity. His hands relax. “I think I should see him. Connor had something important to tell me.”

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