Page 21 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“No. You’re the secondary contact.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I feel the color drain from my face, as if escaping through a tiny hole punctured in my jaw. I slump down to the floor and Connor follows, and only for a moment, it’s like we’re teenagers again. He’s quizzing me on the constitutional amendments while I’m inhaling the extra bologna sandwich he brought me for lunch. He’s keeping an extra flannel shirt in his locker for me to borrow when I have bruises to conceal. “I mean it, Connor. There’s no universe where I should be my estranged sister’s emergency contact.”

He lifts a palm. “Scout’s honor.”

“Who made me her contact? When?”

“That’s above my pay grade,” he says.

“Then whose pay grade is it and where can I find them?”

“Providence, what’s going on?”

“Before my mother disappeared, she gave Grace my phone number,” I tell him. “If she made me her emergency contact … shit. She had to know something was going to happen to her.”

“Making arrangements.”

“She didn’t have brothers or sisters, or friends, or anyone she could turn to if she was in trouble. I’m it.”

“What about Harmony?” he asks.

“She’s always been a wild card.” I can’t imagine Harmony upending her day for Grace the way I just did. Pure fiction.

“Right,” he says, skepticism elongating his syllable, “but just from a practical perspective, it would make more sense for her to pick Harmony as Grace’s emergency contact. You live two states away.”

I consider this and shake the thought from my head. “My mother must have known I’d come looking for her. A chance to right all my wrongs.”

Connor massages his knuckles against the side of his skull. There is a desperation to the tiny circular motion, a frantic attempt to stimulate blood flow and revitalize his peaked expression. “That’s a good thing though, isn’t it? If she left of her own volition, then it’s more likely she’s not in danger.”

“But the thing I can’t wrap my head around is—why now? Why leave now, after thirty years and three children?”

“God willing,” he says, “she’ll be able to tell you why herself.”

We drive past the pool hall. My father’s car is gone. He’ll be home, waiting for us.

Grace surprises me by insisting on pumpkin ice cream. We claim the last available picnic table outside the ice cream parlor to bask in the sunshine and watch the storm clouds drift eastward.

“You let Katy’s mom walk all over you.” Grace nibbles the corner of her chocolate-dipped waffle cone like a rabbit. I encouraged her to create the most extravagant ice cream imaginable so she would like me more. I envisioned sprinkles and whipped cream; instead, Grace has constructed the Mount Everest of ice cream, topped with cookie crumbles, fudge, peanut butter cups, gummy bears, and more decadent toppings I suspect she added not because she liked the taste, but to make the treat more expensive. Just looking at it would put a diabetic in a coma. “Like … you let her call us animals. That’s so fucked up.”

“Don’t sayfuck.”

“Oh, now you care about what I do?”

The ice cream tastes like autumn. It’s sweet enough to make my molars ache. “What did you want me to say to her, Grace?”

“I don’t know! Literally anything at all would have been better than sitting there and taking it like you did, stupid smile on your face.” She corrals a chocolate chip into her mouth with the tip of her tongue, guiding it through the gap between her front teeth.

“Nothing I said was going to make her think any different of us. Some people are only ever going to think of us as Tom Byrd’s daughters. They’re going to think we’re trash, no matter what we say. You don’t reason with people like her. You let them be wrong.”

“But they’re not wrong,” she mumbles.

“Is that what you think of yourself? That you’re trash?”

“Is there a better word for us?” She engrosses herself in scooping her monstrosity into the extra bowl the cashier provided us.You’ll be needing this, he said upon witnessing Grace’s creation. She breaks the cone into fragments with her plastic spoon. “We’re a poor, dumb, backwater family full of drunks and addicts.”

“It doesn’t defineyou. You’re not the sum of your family.”

She points her spoon at me. “But you’re contradicting what you just said. It doesn’t matter who we are individually. All roads lead to him.”

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