Page 30 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

The sharpness of her tone dismisses me. I seize the opportunity to tour the rest of the downstairs. There is a new leather sofa in the living room, right beside the lumpy, tattered recliner my father installs himself in to watch Rockies games in the summer, Broncos games in the winter, and Nuggets games in the spring. Above all else, the living room is a shrine to his hometown teams. The sole Rockies pennant hangs above the entertainment center, flanked by metal signs shaped like home plate and emblazoned with the team logo. Elsewhere there are bobbleheads, throw blankets, photographs of Coors Field, baseball and basketball jerseys, and even a coat hanger personalized with my father’s name and Broncos insignia. The only decoration in the room unrelated to sports is the small urn of his mother’s ashes on the mantle. Byrd men are buried in the family plot; Byrd women are cremated and left to gather dust. There’s a beer on the end table, still half full. I move it off the coaster to spite him.

I hold my breath through the cloud of mildew in the laundry room and don’t breathe again until I’m in the backyard. I find the water bowl in a sliver of shade beside the toolshed, where, my better judgment notwithstanding, I linger too long. Nestled against the fence is a stone withANNIEpainted on it in childish scrawl. It’s a memorial for my childhood dog. We couldn’t bury her, and my father was sorry for that, but he wanted me to have a place I could mourn.Make something for Annie. Make something pretty.

I hope he doesn’t shoot the cat. Please, God. If the universe is a merciful one, he will leave the cat alone.

I smoke a cigarette to calm my nerves and pulverize it beneath the heel of my shoe when I’m done. My relief is short-lived. Backin the kitchen, the scent of the chokecherry pie now mingles with tuna noodle casserole to create a smell I can only describe as ghastly. A bundle of nerves clogs my throat. Grace is still at the sink, enveloped in a plume of steam. “Did you see the cat?” she asks without looking up. “Big orange furball?”

“No sign of him, but he’ll have fresh water when he comes around.”

“Still feeding that stray?” Harmony’s voice is like a stone thrown through a window. She kicks off her grubby sandals in the entryway and traipses into the kitchen. For Grace, she gives a kiss on the cheek. For me, nothing. “What’s his name again?”

“Bucket,” Grace says sheepishly.

Harmony helps herself to a cold beer. She flicks the cap off with a steak knife. “Like something out of a cartoon.”

“I found him sleeping in a bucket. I thought it was a good name for a stray.”

“I think it’s a great name.” I pluck the beer cap off the floor and toss it into the trash can. As I sit beside Harmony at the table, the same cherrywood one Gil Crawford built for us when I was young, she unfolds the newspaper for the sole purpose of blocking me from her view. I should be irritated by how little she’s changed in the years since we last saw each other, the pitifulness of a twentysomething with the emotional maturity of a preteen, but it stokes a protective fire within me that, before now, I’d only felt toward Grace.

Grace crams the last bowl into the dishwasher. Her forehead glistens with sweat. “You can help yourself to the beers too, Providence. Dad won’t mind.”

“He always minds when it comes to beer.”

“He said it’s a special occasion.”

All three of us glance at the clock at the same time. It’s already seven. He’s locking up the liquor store right now.

“Tuna noodle casserole, right?” Harmony asks.

Grace nods and takes the empty seat between us. She crosses her legs once at the thighs, then again at the ankles, an unnatural contortion better suited to a yoga class than a dinner table. “It’s the only thing he can make,” she says. “That and scrambled eggs.”

“He always made a ham at Christmas,” I add.

Harmony scoffs but does not elaborate.

“He still makes the Christmas ham.” Grace smiles at us both, but the corners of her lips falter when she fails to break the tension. I give her my undivided attention. Let Harmony be the one to look insolent. “He bought new lights for the house last year too. Mom thought he was going to fall off the ladder and kill himself putting them up.”

“God willing,” Harmony snorts.

Grace sighs. “Harmony, stop.”

“Come on, don’t act like it wouldn’t be the best thing that ever happened to us if the old man kicked the bucket tomorrow. It’s too bad Providence tried to murder the wrong parent.”

I steer the conversation back to normalcy. “We always had good Christmases. The decorations, the ham, chokecherry pie …”

“They took Grace and I to Carey Gap to look at lights every year,” Harmony says, emphasizingGrace and Ito underscore my exclusion.

“They took you and me too before Grace was born.”

She ignores me again.

“I’m surprised I didn’t see you at the search this morning,” I quip to Harmony.

“I had other business to attend to.”

“More important than finding our mother?”

She laughs too hard. “That’s rich coming from you. You don’t really give a shit if Mom comes back or not. When this is all said and done, you’ll just go back to wherever you came from and pretend none of this ever happened. You don’t have to livewith the consequences of what happens here. You get to go along your merry way, and we get to clean up the wreckage. Same as it’s always been.”

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