Page 50 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

10:55AM

AT THE NURSINGhome two days later, I am reduced to a teenager once again. Gil beams when I appear in his doorway. He is stationed at his window-side table with the same puzzle and a flaccid tuna fish sandwich. He has plucked out the onions and piled them on a nearby napkin. “Providence! Shouldn’t you be in school today?”

“Not today, Mr. Crawford.”

He narrows his eyes. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you?”

“If I am, would you tell my parents?”

“Help me with this blasted puzzle and we’ll call it even.”

I start to place my purse on the windowsill but quickly reconsider. I leave it strung across my chest, pinning it against my side with an elbow. He has made enough progress on the puzzle for me to recognize the finished result will be a hilly green landscape with a farmhouse and livestock. “Have you seen Connor today?” I ask.

“Busy with baseball,” Gil says. “Coach Romanoff wants to move him to the infield, but my boy’s better with the bat than the glove. Right field is where he belongs.”

“A good bat gets you more scholarships than a good glove.” I hope the words reignite memories of how proud he was when Connor earned a baseball scholarship to Purdue—take you to your favorite restaurant to celebrate proud, tears in his eyes proud.

“Ah, don’t be so down on yourself. The Truman State scout was eating out of your hand last week. You’ll get a scholarship.”

“My father says I get it from him. All glove, no bat. I barely hit above the Mendoza line.”

Gil tries to cram a piece into the hills, but the pale blue hue tells me it belongs in the sky. He resists my attempts to redirect his hand. He grunts and presses down on the piece with his thumb but cannot achieve the verisimilitude of it fitting.

“Mr. Crawford, when’s the last time you saw my mom?”

His stare is equal parts earnest and suspicious. “How do you mean?”

“I just … I wondered if you’d bumped into each other.” What I really want to know is if Gil can summon forth his last memory of my mother, if it will magically bring her into sharper focus for me.

“At the mailbox.”

We lived two streets away from each other. “Are you sure, Mr. Crawford?”

He wets his finger with his tongue as if that will make the puzzle piece fit. “Maybe it was church. Yeah, yeah. She wanted to join the choir. She talked to the new preacher about it. Fella with the tumor in his neck.”

It isn’t a new memory. It’s one from my teenage years. Joining the church choir had been one of my mother’s short-lived hobbies undertaken during her periods of sobriety. She tried crochet but gave up halfway through a single sock. She tried drawing but broke all her colored pencils within a week. She triedbirdwatching, but my father never allowed her to go further than the end of the street, and there were no birds in our trees because no birds wanted to nest near a house always erupting with shouts and screams. Her failure always drove her back to the bottle. She never even got to audition for the choir. My father forbade it.

“Do you think people are destined to become their parents?” I ask.

He cannot translate the question into digestible words. “Hmm?”

“I mean—do you see my mother in me? My father? Not that I’m going to be an addict or a …” None of the words I typically use to describe my father sound right. Lowlife. Monster. Beast. “There’s no good in them. There’s probably no good in me either. You can’t plant a tree in salted soil and expect it to grow.”

“Hmm.”

“I don’t know how I sleep at night,” I say, more to myself than to him.

“Black widows eat their mothers. They sleep fine.”

“But do they know it’s their mother when they eat her?”

He abandons the ill-fitting piece. “Sure they do, but it’s nature. Some babies are meant to eat their mothers. Some mothers are meant to eat their young. People don’t eat their families—aside from the odd psychopath, I guess—but we take pieces from each other all the same. We cannibalize everyone we love until it’s time for someone to cannibalize us.”

“Knock, knock!” The chipper voice at the door belongs to Penny. From halfway across the room, I hear her smacking a wad of gum and smell the hot cinnamon on her breath. “Oh! Should I come back a little later? You two look like you’re in the middle of something … important?”

“The sandwich had onions in it,” Gil says.

“You asked for extra.”

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