Page 25 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

All my muscles constrict, my body attempting to collapse in on itself.Elissa.He thinks I’m my mother. Every time I think the universe has exhausted its supply of cruel jokes to play on me, it cooks up another.

“Mr. Crawford, I—”

Gil waves his hand as if swatting away a gnat. “Call me Gil. You’ve known me nigh on twenty years now. Help me with this puzzle, will you? Got to get that last corner. Wish I could find my damn chessboard instead.”

Considering his declining mental faculties, the puzzle has been pieced together with skill, its border complete but for the pesky final corner. He was always good at puzzles. It was his hobby of choice, that and chess. I set my purse on the floor and take the seat across from him. We sift through the box. Gil holds each piece up to the light for scrutiny like a surgeon checking to see if his scalpel is still sharp before making the next cut.

“These corners.” He discards an examined piece back into the same box he plucked it from. No wonder he can’t complete the last corner: he has made assembling the puzzle a Sisyphean effort. “Useless until we find all the corners.”

“Why don’t we make another pile for the pieces we’ve already checked?”

“Hmm?”

I place the puzzle box lid on the windowsill. Just outside, two hummingbirds hover beside a feeder filled with red nectar.Gil’s room overlooks a small courtyard with overgrown shrubbery and a water fountain tinged green with algae. “After you look at a piece,” I say, “drop it into the new box here, like this.”

“Good idea.” He proceeds to drop the next piece in the wrong box. “How’s Marjorie? She’s been so busy, haven’t seen her lately.”

I feel like I’m hurtling through whitewater rapids, flailing my arms to catch hold of a rock or a tree root, anything to keep from drowning. I resent Penny for leaving me here without instructions. What do you do when a person you love thinks you’re someone else? What do you do when they ask about their dead wife? Gil’s eyes are eager and hopeful. I have to lie, like I did about Coach Romanoff. I have to crawl inside his world.

“We’re getting to the end of the month,” I say. “That’s when they get busy in her office. She’ll come around soon, I promise.”

“Next time you’re in Carey Gap, you should go to lunch together. Marjorie’s always been fond of you.”

“I’ve always been fond of her too.” This much, at least, is true. His late wife was a sweet woman.

“Remember the song she likes to play on the piano? The old Civil War ballad?”

“ ‘Lorena.’ It was a beautiful piece of music,” I say. “I like when she sings it too.”

We lapse into an uncomfortable rhythm. Gil drops pieces into the wrong box and I fish them out. The corner continues to elude us. Across the hallway, another resident watchesWheel of Fortuneat sonar blast volume. We can hear contestants buying vowels and going bankrupt.

“You shouldn’t be hanging around Mitch Perkins.”

Mitch Perkins? Who the hell is that?

“I don’t know what the two of you get up to—and frankly, it isn’t my business—but Tom is … well, Tom is Tom.” Gil crinkles his nose. “Not exactly slow to anger, is he?”

“That’s from Proverbs, isn’t it?”

“James,” he says. “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.”

It’s my turn to be slow to speak as I turn the name over in my head.Mitch Perkins. Most last names around here ring a bell to me, a person I went to school with or a family with a reputation for handing out princely portions of Halloween candy, but Perkins comes up empty. I file the name away to give Daniel later. It’s that or poking around the Tyre pool hall and asking too many questions, drawing too much attention.

“You should go to church more,” I say after a moment. It strikes me as something my mother would say. “It’d encourage Providence to go, I bet.”

An emotion I can’t quite recognize flickers on his face, like my name unlocked a vault of memories previously inaccessible. He balances a puzzle piece between his thumb and index finger, the tip of his tongue peeking out between his lips in concentration. “Go easy on her. She’s a good kid.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say.

“I think she’ll surprise you.”

“How so?”

This gives him pause. “She could be an astronaut.”

“I don’t think she wants—”

“Not a real astronaut, no.” His laugh is still hearty and warm. It’s the laugh of a man who gives each character a unique voice when he reads storybooks to his son, a man who dresses up as Santa every Christmas. “But she’ll leave Annesville and go to college, and that’s even more impressive than going to the moon in my book. You should be proud of her, Elissa.”

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