Page 9 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

11:11PM

IT’S THE FIRSTSunday in recent memory I haven’t been tattooing. I should do something novel with my freedom, but there’s no entertainment to be found in this slice of the country. Everything closes by sundown. All I can do is putter on my laptop and wait to feel drowsy, which probably won’t be for several hours. I scroll through Zoe’s campaign website.Zoe Markham—Fighting for the True Nebraska.The home page showcases a photo of her standing in front of a green pasture, her cornsilk hair radiant in the sunlight. She wears a pink button-up and a pair of jeans so tight they look painted on. The blurb beneath the photo extols her roots in the Nebraska sandhills and her devout Christian upbringing, a clever spin on being raised Jehovah’s Witness and hating every moment of it. Her photos are all absent of a husband, her left hand absent of a ring.

I feign interest in her policy positions. They’re ludicrously libertarian. She supports marijuana legalization and opposesdriver’s licenses, which, considering she knows someone who used a car as a weapon, puzzles me. There’s no mention of her position on same-sex marriage. I can’t tell if it’s by design or by accident.

As I read an op-ed detailing Zoe’s vociferous opposition to routing the Keystone XL pipeline through the sandhills, my phone buzzes. I let the unknown number go to voicemail, but it rings again. It’s probably one of the new artists at work who can’t find the barrier gel. No one else calls at midnight.

“Hello?”

“Providence?” The voice is too young to be one of the girls at the shop. She sounds nervous, almost apologetic.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Grace.”

“Grace.”

“I’m sorry—I know this is, like, really weird, and out of the blue, but …” She trails off.

I clutch the phone so tightly it might snap in two, like the slightest movement might cause my sister to hang up. “No, no, it’s fine. How did you get my number?”

“Can you help me? I’m—well, I’m in a bit of a pickle, one might say.”

“What kind of pickle?”

“Dill,” she snorts. “No, sorry, I’m being stupid. I promise I can explain when you get here. I’m at the sheriff’s office.”

“Give me an hour.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you! I’ll explain everything, I promise.” Grace appeals to me like I’m her mother, not her older sister. Part of me expects it. I’m thirty and she’s only seventeen. To her, I’m a senior citizen. “I’ll tell him you’ll be here soon. Thank you, Providence.”

Adrenaline courses through my body and pools hot in my stomach like a shot of whiskey. I’m counting on it to get methrough my encounter with the sheriff. I slip on my shoes, scribble a note to Sara, and run out to the car.

The sheriff’s office in Carey Gap shares a parking lot with a church, an accidental expression of its views on the separation of church and state. The two brick buildings are indistinguishable from one another but for their flags. Both hoist American flags into the sky, but the sheriff’s station pairs theirs with the rich blue Nebraska state flag, the church with a Christian flag.

Inside, the office is deserted, only a few empty desks and filing cabinets to fill the cavernous room. This isn’t because it’s midnight. Tillman County operates a shoestring police force, forever vacillating between six and seven officers—six if one of the fossils retired, seven if some poor kid from Tyre just graduated from the training program. The floorboards in the entryway announce my steps. Even though the sheriff is expecting me, it seems like trespassing to be here so late. I’m halfway across the room when he emerges from the back office, drawing the door to a close behind him.

“Miss Byrd.” His voice is hoarse and dry like he swallows razorblades.

“Sheriff Eastman.”

Josiah Eastman is a bear of a man in his late fifties, tall and broad with a lumberjack beard. He carries himself with a John Wayne swagger, though he is for once without his trademark cowboy hat to cover his shock of graying hair. His teeth are brown from chewing dip. “I’m glad you came to look for your mother.” He coatsmotherin venom. We are both remembering the morning he hauled me into this office in handcuffs. “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

I resent his fatherly tone. “Doing the right thing? Pretty rich coming from you.”

“I always tried to do right by you and your sisters,” he says. “I wasn’t perfect, Lord knows. I’ve got a lot of regrets, but I always did the best I could.”

My hand comes to my cheekbone, reconstructed with plates and screws. All the times Josiah responded to a 911 call at our house and never once did he offer me anything more useful than a bandage or a prayer. Old Tom Byrd put the fear of God into everyone, including the sheriff. They knew each other from boyhood. My father is the reason Josiah has a crooked nose, a dead dog, and, depending on who you believe, at least one child of dubious parentage. “I want to see Grace.”

“You’ll have to wait,” he says. “Still got some paperwork to finish up.”

“What did she do? Run someone over with a car?”

My joke lands with the grace of a fish flailing on dry land. To prove his “paperwork” is not an invented excuse, he seats himself at a nearby desk and opens a manila folder. “Joyriding.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s a class-three misdemeanor. Hardly a case ofthat’s it.”

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