Page 34 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Three shortstops on the same team?” Grace asks.

He points at me with his beer. “We thought Providence was going to be a boy. She would have been Thomas Byrd Jr.” He mutes the television as a commercial comes on. “I still remember when the doctor handed you to me and I saw the pink blanket. I thought they’d made a mistake.”

“My mot—Mom had an ultrasound. You knew I was going to be a girl.”

He shakes his head. “No, butterfly. I think you’re remembering wrong.”

I am not. My mother showed me the ultrasound when I was a teenager, with the wordsbaby #1 is a girl!jotted along the top of the picture. I chew on a bite of pie until it liquefies and trickles down my throat like sludge. Even when my mouth is empty, I keep chewing. I can’t stop moving. If I’m not chewing, I am tapping a foot. If I’m not tapping a foot, I am quivering. I’m fighting against primal instincts. My brain triggers the fight-or-flight response over and over again, and the longer I remain planted on this couch, the more unbearable the adrenaline becomes.

He laughs to himself, like he’s come up with a brilliant punchline for a joke he has wanted to tell all evening. “But listen, I’ve got to ask … Grace, Harmony, what do we all think about the fake tits?”

“Dad!” Grace chokes on her pie. “Don’t say that.”

“Sorry, sorry. Just—it’s the elephant in the room, you know?”

Harmony can’t help herself. “Elephants, plural.”

“How’d you get the money for those, butterfly?”

My gaze falls to my chest. I see them for the first time the way other people do, as silicone cries for attention, instead of the first and only way I have ever been able to dictate the terms of my own sexuality. “None of your business.”

“Guessing you didn’t marry a rich man.”

“No.”

“Ah, nothing wrong with that. Your mom didn’t marry me because I was the richest man in Annesville, that’s for damn sure.” She married him because she was sixteen and pregnant with me. He only proposed because he was twenty-seven and thought, erroneously, he was staring down a statutory rape charge if they didn’t tie the knot. He told the story to prove my mother was a slut. Sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be so easy, after all.

“Do you miss her?” Harmony asks.

“I miss her like hell,” he says, “but I know she’ll walk through that door any minute now. I’ll never get rid of her. Like a bad penny.”

“Someone must have kidnapped her.”

“Harmony, stop,” Grace pleads.

“Use your brain, Grace.” Harmony taps an index finger against her temple. “You’re always talking about those stupid podcasts you listen to. You can’t tell me you think she’s enjoying a vacation in Yellowstone.”

“I know nothing good happened to her, okay? I don’t like thinking about Mom being kidnapped. It makes me sick.”

“All I’m saying is someone probably took her, tied her up—”

“Enough!” Our father clouts the side of his recliner. “Quit it. You’re scaring her. That’s enough from all of you.”

“It’s not that I’m, like, naïve about it.” Grace looks at her plate while she talks. The last shard of crust crumbles when she stabs it with her fork. “I try to have a little hope is all.”

“Hope is dangerous,” Harmony says. “You give someone a shred of hope and they cling to it for the rest of their life.”

I cringe at my father’s roar before I even hear it. We violated his cardinal rule: when he asks for something, he only asks once. “Not another goddamn word about your mother. Not one more goddamn word.”

The game is back on. He dials up the volume loud enough to catch the attention of a passing jet airplane. Only Harmony is unaffected by his pivot from jovial to cross. She stretches languorously across the couch and shakes her beer to coax out the dregs. I notice the severe dip from her ribcage to her stomach, how her hipbones strain against her skin. I examine her for scars, but Harmony doesn’t even have moles or birthmarks, never mind mutilation as extreme as my own. No trace of how she tried to end her life. I want to ask her the same questions Grace asked me. What is it like for her? Is she haunted too?

“I’m going outside for a cigarette,” I say when the Rockies pull their starting pitcher. The manager, a toad of a man, waddles out to the mound with his hands stacked on his hips.

“Grab me another beer while you’re up.”

I get in the car and floor it.

CHAPTER

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