Page 5 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.” Sara exhales smoke through her nose like a dragon. “Tragedy brings people together, so they say.”

I’ve spent years thinking I was ready to reunite with my sisters, but now, with the moment only hours away, every nerve undulates with brittle energy, a million live wires without a socket. There may be tearful embraces. They may run me out of town. Other than the morsels of information Connor provided me, my sisters are strangers. Even the simplest pieces of their personality are mysteries to me.

“Blood is thicker than water,” she adds.

“This is like talking to a fortune cookie.”

Sara snorts as she ashes her cigarette. “I can dispense familial wisdom or I can comment on your fake tits.”

“Are they that obvious?”

“They’d have kept you afloat for hours after theTitanicsank.”

I laugh with Sara. “I’ve paid them off already.”

“You really make that much money tattooing?” she asks.

“It’s shockingly lucrative.”

She releases a puff of smoke when she scoffs. “I work two days a week as a library aide, and that’s a small miracle. If I didn’t have my aunt and uncle helping me pay the bills, I’d probably be homeless.”

We are both intimately familiar with the hand-to-mouth existence of a former felon, especially a female felon. We wash dishes in chain restaurants, weasel our ways into seedy strip clubs, or get lucky. All things considered, I’m one of the lucky ones.

Julius and Augustus lumber into the trailer and curl up on opposite ends of the couch, their tails just touching as if to remind the other of their presence. Zenobia does not move from her watch beside Sara. As terrifying as I find her bayonet-sharp teeth, I also admire her loyalty. I get the impression she’d run headlong into a burning building if Sara needed rescuing.

Ash accumulates on the end of my cigarette in a gray appendage, like a limb deprived of blood flow. I want to see how long it can grow before disintegrating. “Is your brother going to be at the search later?”

She crinkles her nose and nods. “He’s none too pleased you’re here.”

“Did you tell him I’m on the straight and narrow?”

“Nothing is straight or narrow enough for Daniel. Ever since he made tribal police chief, he’s insufferable. I swear to God, I drive one mile above the speed limit and the vein in his head starts throbbing like the Hulk.”

I hope my laughter masks my envy. Sara had an endless stream of family who visited her in prison, from ne’er-do- well second cousins to her cop brother to her mother dying from a cirrhotic liver. There was a parade of loved ones waiting for her on the other side, and, as I gathered from our spotty correspondence over the years, the ones who haven’t died have all stuck around. She has people who love her. She has family. A pang of loneliness slides between my ribs like a splinter.

Observant as ever, mindful of the landmine we are near, Sara guides our conversation back to the matter at hand. “Search doesn’t start until five. It’s too hot to go out before then. You can unpack, maybe take a nap.”

I nod, extinguish my cigarette, and follow her to the room off the kitchen. It’s clearly a storage room with an air mattress thrown onto the floor, but after five years of sleeping on a metal prison bunk, I can sleep anywhere. Unmarked cardboard boxes flank the bed like two nightstands. She’s laid out a toothbrush, shampoo, and conditioner for me atop the scuffed bookshelf. As I unzip my suitcase, my muscles slackening at the imminent relief of a nap, Sara gasps like she’s taken a bullet to the chest. “What the hell, Providence?”

“What?”

She seizes the bottle of vodka from the depths of my suitcase. “You knew better.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I won’t drink it here.”

It’s not enough. She storms into the kitchen with the bottle lifted high, the gentleness of her gait replaced by a single-minded ire. Before I can muster an apology, she dumps the vodka down the kitchen sink. “Long Grass is a dry reservation,” she says. “You don’t get to flout the rules just because you don’t live here.”

“Sara, I—”

“You bring another bottle into my house and I’ll throw your ass out on the street before you canSarame again.” Her eyes are flinty, cold, appalled at my carelessness but not surprised by it. She taps the bottleneck against the drain to coax out the last drops.

“It won’t happen again. I’m sorry.”

“We don’t need another Byrd ruining Long Grass with liquor.”

Another Byrd.Now I’m the one who has been shot in the chest. It is bone-chilling to be compared to my father, my existence a colorless echo of his own. His liquor store, just miles away from the reservation, poisoning her people. For Sara, this is her eye for an eye. I violate her cardinal rule and ignore her tribal law, and in turn, she presses on my oldest, deepest bruise.

We don’t say anything more. I retreat to the bedroom and Sara to the backyard with a crateful of dog toys, her menagerie trailing close behind her. I crave a drink, a stiff shot of my vodka, but even more, I crave biting myself.

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