Page 84 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

I stop. I look down. I have tripped over a pair of shoes. Women’s shoes. White heels with plastic ribbons on the toes.

My mother’s shoes.

I wait on the couch, the shoes on the cushion beside me, my spine rigid like I’ve run a steel rod through it. When I glance at the shoes, I can’t think of anything but my mother’s mutilated foot, the fraying cords of muscle straining to keep it attached to the rest of her leg. I try to remember how she looked in these shoes, and when I fail to do that, I just try to remember her alive, walking, breathing. But now, in every memory, her foot is bloody and falling off, and she is dead.

Connor sees the shoes as soon as he comes in the house, almost midnight, but he isn’t alarmed. He reacts with little more than a long sigh.

“Why do you have my mother’s shoes in the workshop?”

He reaches behind him. He takes out my pistol.

“Why did you hide a gun in my dad’s room?”

“You killed my mother! If I want to hide a nuclear bomb in your dad’s room, you can’t say shit to me about it.” I sound like I’m on the verge of tears, but it is fury—thirty years of it comingto a hilt—that runs my voice ragged. “You killed my mother and then you had the temerity to act like my friend. You stood there and you comforted me when they found her body!”

“I did not hurt your mother, Providence.”

“You’re a liar.”

“My dad did, and it was a fucking accident, I swear to God. Let me explain, please.”

“You don’t run people over on accident!”

“You do when you have Alzheimer’s and you don’t know how to use a car anymore. You do when you forget that the old service road out to the water tower isn’t the highway to Scottsbluff. He called me in tears, Providence. He knew he’d done something awful.”

The service road. My mother’s favorite shortcut to church, the only snatches of time she was a free woman. I stand, which he sees as an invitation to approach me. “I’ll break your nose if you take another step toward me.” I draw my arm back so he knows I mean it.

“I would never hurt you.”

“Just like you’d never hurt my mother, right?”

“How do you think he got to the church the first day you got here? He didn’t walk twenty miles! He’s done it before: takes some nurse’s keys, gets in her car, and comes back to Annesville. He can’t leave Annesville behind. Sometimes it’s the church, sometimes it’s the house, once it was—”

“But you hid her body.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“You threw her away like trash!” I cry. “You dumped her in the woods, and you let the vultures eat her eyes and the coyotes mangle her feet, and then you held me when I saw her body.”

“I was protecting my dad.”

“He killed her!”

“It was an accident. A freak accident—a one-in-a-billion accident. You think I would have done that if I knew he did iton purpose? He called me, and he cried, and he begged me for help, so I did what I had to do to keep him safe. He’s still a person. He’s still my dad.”

“And what was my mom?”

“Your mom was a person too, but not my person.”

“I’m going to the police.”

Connor lifts the gun. The safety is engaged. “You do that and I’ll tell them about the gun.”

“How did you find it?”

“I went to the nursing home for his meds. I found it next to his goddamn Namenda bottles.”

“Who says it’s mine?”

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