Page 31 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Outside, the porch steps creak. Our reactions are lightning quick, like we’ve been digging through our parents’ sock drawer for spare change and need to hide the evidence before they come upstairs. Beers on coasters. Newspaper folded up. The last suds in the sink washed down the drain. Grace meets him in the entryway, beer in hand. I taught Harmony how to welcome him home. She must have taught Grace too.

Our father stalls in the doorway to soak in the scene before him, his face alight with a placid smile. I try to imagine this moment as innocent. I try to think of it as any man, finally home after a long day’s work, eager to spend an evening with his children.

“My three girls. I’ve been waiting years for this.” Youngest to oldest, Grace then Harmony then me, he plants a kiss atop our heads, a ceremony he performs with the grandeur of a priest blessing his sinners. “Gracie, open this beer for me.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

“Serve up the casserole while you’re up. I’m starving.”

Grace buzzes around the kitchen with the measured efficiency of a waitress. She divvies up the utensils alone, more like the help than part of the family. “Let me make myself useful,” I offer.

But when I stand, my father takes me by the wrist. His touch is more tender than it was this morning, and it throws me off balance.

“She can do it herself, butterfly.”

“I don’t mind—”

“All under control,” Grace chirps as she distributes the napkins. My father gets his first.

Harmony angles toward our father as he takes the head of the table—right next to me. “How did the search go?”

“Useless again. Fucking sheriff’s department couldn’t find treasure if you gave them a map withXmarking the spot. I’m planning to go down there tomorrow and give Sheriff Eastman a piece of my mind. Whole thing has been a travesty so far. How hard is it to find some old man’s wife after she’s run off?” His Adam’s apple pulses grotesquely as he swills his beer. He sets the bottle down with a satisfiedahhh.

“Was work any better?” Harmony asks.

“Busy morning, slow afternoon. Accident on the road up to the reservation.”

The two-lane highway linking Annesville to Long Grass is a magnet for drunk drivers. Head-on collisions and cars coiled around utility poles routinely bottleneck traffic to one lane or shut the road down entirely. Our father regales us with the colorful account of a man who tried to shoplift a handle of whiskey by shoving it down his pants. He doesn’t pause to thank Grace when she sets his plate before him. Her shoulders deflate as she fetches the other plates. She is going above and beyond to fill the gaps left by our mother, but to our father, she is merely doing what is expected of her. He doesn’t care which woman opens his beer and dishes up his dinner. We exist to serve him.

At last, the four of us are seated at the table. The tuna noodle casserole is heaped on the center of my plate in an amorphous gray mound, its surface cratered with peas and cubed mushrooms. I’m reaching for my fork when my father takes my hand. I hunch my shoulders and squeeze my arms against myself until I am as small as I can possibly be.

“I’d like you to say grace,” my father says to me.

“I’m out of practice.” I look to Grace for help, but she is absently picking the peas out of her food and corralling them to the edge of the plate.

His crows’ feet deepen when he smiles. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “It’s like swimming. You never forget.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

“Come on now. Don’t be difficult.”

He takes Grace’s hand, and, begrudgingly, Harmony takes mine. I am surprised by the ease with which I recall the grace prayer and how steady my words are, even as my thoughts dissolve into indistinct panic. “Gracious God, we have sinned against Thee, and are unworthy of Thy mercy. Pardon our sins and bless these mercies for our use, and help us eat and drink to Thy glory for Christ’s sake. Amen.”

My father lowers my hand into my lap. He holds it a moment too long before letting go. His knuckle brushes against my thigh. Beneath the table, I rub my palm against my knee again and again, until the traces of his clammy, calloused touch are only a memory. But now his touch is other places too, the small of my back and the curve of my knee and the nape of my neck. I don’t realize how much I am sweating until a breeze rolls through the window and feels like winter against my damp skin. Every part of me is slick with sweat. I am sweating into this borrowed dress. I am sweating beneath my veneer of makeup. I am sweating behind my ears. I am sweating between my thighs.

“Providence? You’re turning gray.” Grace’s archless eyebrows lift in alarm. “I can get you a cold washcloth.”

I shake my head. “Hot, that’s all.”

My father hooks a finger beneath the sleeve of my denim jacket. There it is again. His touch, light against my inner wrist, rough like the scales of a crocodile. “It’s this goddamn jacket. You’ll get heatstroke if you don’t take this thing off.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What have you got to hide, butterfly?”

I throw myself out of my chair and fly up the stairs two at a time. The bedrooms still have no doors and the floor still creaks, creaks, creaks until the dead spot outside of my old room. I lock myself in the bathroom. Fragments of downstairs conversationfloat up to me and I cannot understand any of it. Suddenly they are speaking another language. I claw at the denim, try to escape from it, but it is a straitjacket. I fight for every breath. My heartbeat throbs in my ears so furiously I expect my eardrums to burst and torrents of blood to gush down my neck.

I need the release. I need it right now. I hike up the sleeve of the jacket as far as it will go, a few measly inches above my wrist, and I bite deep and I bite long, and when the salty tang of blood hits my tongue, I inhale through my teeth. I swear I can see bone when I suck the blood away, but the bite still doesn’t feel deep enough. I want to rend my flesh from my bones. I want to free myself from the body in which I am imprisoned, the body that forces me to remember even when my mind tries to forget.

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