Page 63 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“That was years ago.”

“He hasn’t moved his recliner since then. I can’t imagine he’d move the spare key.”

Most of the men (all of them are men—not a single woman among them) on the sidewalk ignore us or nod politely when we pass. They slump against the cinderblock wall in sweat-soaked shirts, beer cans and whiskey handles at their sides, passing the hours with games of cards, dice, and dominoes. The only man who bothers us is squat and curly-haired, holding a cloudy-eyed chihuahua in his arms. He thinks his vulgar comments about my body will shock me, but they won’t. I’ve heard them all before.

On his wrist is a tattoo of five dots. I gesture to it. “How long were you away?”

“A nickel,” he says. Five years.

“Me too,” I reply.

“Yeah? What for?”

“Aggravated assault.”

I lift the hem of my shirt just enough to show him my quincunx tattoo, tucked beneath my ribs, right where you might try to shank me. Four dots to signify the prison walls, a single dot in the middle to represent the prisoner. Kiera’s offered to cover it for years, but I’m too fond of it. Baby’s first ink. I traded a whole book of stamps for it.

A tenuous understanding emerges between me and the man with the chihuahua: we are part of the same terrible club. He spits into the gutter and staggers toward the men playing dice. The dog yips at me and Sara or, more likely, at nothing at all, just the void of its blind eyes.

We round the corner and slip into the narrow, lightless alleyway between the liquor stores and the auto repair shop’s junkyard. There is someone snoring in a sleeping bag and someone masturbating furiously near the dumpsters, but otherwise, we’re alone. I grab the metal rod leaned up against the wall, which is just long enough to extend above the awning over my father’sdoor. I flail blindly for a while before I hear metal grating against metal, then yank the pole back toward me. The keys fall into the weeds without a sound.

I was with my father one day, maybe eleven or twelve years old, when he retrieved his spare keys from atop the awning. I can’t remember why I tagged along with him to the liquor store that day. He pressed a finger over his lips andshh’d me as he poked around the awning with the metal rod, and the gesture filled me with treacherous warmth because it was the first time my father had asked me to keep a secret that didn’t involve hurting me. By then I was old enough that my fear of him was beginning to calcify to hatred, but not old enough to resist my biological hardwiring. Part of me still remained hungry for him to love me in the innocent, wholesome way other fathers loved their daughters.

“It’s the opposite of hiding the keys under the doormat, butterfly,” he said when he finally got the keys. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“You really can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Sara says as I ease the key into the lock. I expected it to resist, as if it could somehow sense that I was an intruder, but the door glides on its hinges like they’re buttered. We steal into the storeroom, nothing but boxes of liquor and old paperwork piled high on the wobbly desk shoved against the wall. A box fan hums in the corner. “I wish we could burn this fucking place down,” she says.

“I am not going away for arson.”

“Let me dream, okay?” she whispers. “What are we looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Explain for those of us who won’t know it when they see it.”

“Her shoes, her jewelry, anything that looks like it belonged to her. Some piece of her that he has no business having.” I letout a heavy sigh. “Sara, I know you said his alibi is solid, but I need to make sure it isn’t him.”

“I’ll take the storeroom if you want the register.”

She wants the storeroom so she can rummage through my father’s paperwork, but I don’t force the issue. We keep the lights off to maintain what little secrecy we have; the slivers of moonlight lancing between the blinds will have to be enough.

It resembles every other liquor store I’ve been in, snack aisles in the middle and liquor aisles on the fringes, tiny shot-sized bottles of liquor filling the endcaps. I consider drinking one but think better of it when I remember Sara is only ten feet away. Cigarettes are locked up behind the cabinet (locked in the most literal sense of the word, with a heavy chain and padlock strung around the glass cabinet). Between shelving units drilled into the walls are glossy posters of women in bikinis eating burgers, women in bikinis posing on monster trucks, and women in bikinis with crisp American flags cloaking their shoulders. The posters make me queasier than the mothball-mixed-with-piss odor in the air.

The cash register is locked, but every other drawer is ripe for the picking. I comb through colorful lotto scratchers and crumpled receipts, old to-do lists and fast food burger wrappers. Two bullet casings rattle around the bottommost drawer, but I don’t let myself get excited by the discovery. My mother wasn’t shot. Some other poor bastard was. Mitesh Jadhav.

In the end, I find nothing to connect my father to my mother. I find something much worse instead.

Hidden in the shadows behind the cash register, thumbtacked beneath a calendar of swimsuit models, are three pictures I’ve never seen before. Left to right: me, Harmony, Grace. We’re all frozen at sixteen or seventeen, not quite girls and not quite women, posed in front of the gnarled oak tree in the backyard. The hemlines of our dresses ride high. Our dark hair waterfallsover our shoulders in tight, springy curls. It would be less violating to be one of the women in the calendar.

The memory bubbles to the surface, my hair sizzling as my mother wraps it around her curling iron. The pink babydoll dress I’ve been instructed to wear belonged to my mother once upon a time. It was designed for a narrow, lean body. With my curves, it looks obscene. My mother pauses after every lock of hair to sip her drink and swallows her ice cubes whole. “Just a few pictures,” she says. “It’ll make your father happy. It’ll be over like that.” She punctuates her sentence with a snap and a smile.

A fourth picture has fallen to the floor. My mother. My mother at sixteen, wearing the same pink dress, smoothing the fabric over her modest baby bump. Radiant and sun-soaked, she smiles at her unborn baby. She vows that they will share a lifetime of unquenchable love, but this promise, like all her promises, is too easily broken. There will be gin bottles strewn throughout the house, blankets stained by bodily fluids, doorless bedrooms, and broken cheekbones. There will be a car pitched into reverse on a tepid March morning before church. There will never, ever be enough love.

My father may not have been the one to end my mother’s life, but he killed her all the same. The happy girl in this photo died a long time ago.

It is not sadness that envelopes me then but rage. The emotions are more alike than you think, sharp at their edges and black at their cores. The difference lies in how long you can tolerate them. Sadness will live inside of you forever, but rage demands to be acted upon to its fullest, most terrifying extent.

Our search, just like every search for my mother’s body, yields no helpful clues. We’ve come full circle.

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