Page 73 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Instead of ruminating on my encounter with Grace, I’ve been replaying Sara’s conversation with my father in my head, the recollection growing hazier and more distorted with each recitation, like a tongue twister you’ve attempted too many times. I want to tell her she hurt me, but I also don’t want to explain why such an insignificant remark, one I’m sure she doesn’t remember, meant so much. The longer I’m here, the more I crave a return to my regular life, where I pretend to be a fatherless daughter everywhere except the four walls of my therapist’s office. I wanted him to know I pretended like he was dead. I had hoped it inflicted a psychic wound upon him, an agony he could not escape but could also never place. Now, he can pinpoint exactly where the pain comes from, and he knows it isn’t real.

A homeless woman pushes a shopping cart across the intersection. The seconds click by with only the pattering of rain to keep us from silence. I want to hurt Sara the same way she hurt me.

“Your brother is drinking.”

The noise Sara makes is a cross between a laugh and a gasp. “What do you mean?”

“Bourbon in his coffee.”

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

The homeless woman muscles the shopping cart over the curb and onto the sidewalk. I drive above the limit so we can get back to the trailer and I can hide from the fallout of this conversation. I can’t help but be relieved to finally throw this secret from my back. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

Sara’s face is taut. Her breath strains through her lips in tense, controlled breaths. The emotional relief delivered by my spiteful remark is eclipsed almost immediately by shame, like when you make yourself vomit after a night of drinking to stave off a hangover, only to still feel like death warmed over the morning after.

I pull into the driveway and leave the wipers on high. They squeal against the windshield as the rain lightens. “How long have you known?” Sara stares straight ahead.

“Not long,” I say.

“How long?”

“A few days.”

She flips her visor up. My clip-on air freshener falls to the floor from the disturbance. She pins the plastic, daisy-shaped holder beneath the toe of her shoe and takes it hostage. “So why didn’t you tell me?”

“He was willing to tell me about my mother’s case if I didn’t say anything.”

“So your pain matters more than my pain.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

She brings the full force of her shoe down on the air freshener. The holder cracks like an eggshell. “I don’t see what else it was like.”

“It was about protecting you too. I didn’t want you to hate him, Sara. I know how you feel about alcohol, and when you told me about him going to rehab, how you stopped speaking to him, I thought it’d ruin your relationship if you found out he was doing it again. I thought about you ending up like me, estranged from my sisters, and I just … I didn’t want that to happen to you. It’s horrible.”

“You know what would really ruin my relationship with Daniel? Him dying.”

I try to meet her eyes, but she refuses. “I’m so sorry, Sara.”

“Did you know you’re like a sister to me, Providence? I will never have the same relationship with anyone else that I have with you—and I love you, you dumb, selfish bitch. You’ve been through horrible things, okay? I have too. We’ve both experienced enough trauma for a dozen lifetimes. So we look out for number one, right? It’s how we survive. But the difference is, I know sometimes I need to put other people first, and you are so used to looking out for yourself that you can’t put anyone else first.”

The words are etched into my bones, branded into my skin, with one bigger and bolder than all the rest.Selfish.My first instinct is to refute the epithet, tell her what I said to Grace in the courthouse bathroom, but then my mother’s voice knells through my head.Most people call a spade a spade, Providence, she says as she pours a splash of gin into her water bottle,and even if they’re just being mean, there’s usually a grain of truth in it.

I don’t know if it’s a memory or a figment, but I cling to it all the same. It is already washing away like kelp pulled back into the ocean by the tide, the same as all my recollections of my mother, doomed to fade with time.

“I’m not kicking you out, because I know you don’t have anywhere else to go, but I need space.” She looks at me from thecorner of her eye. “I love you. But I can’t even look at you right now.”

“I love you too, Sara.”

“I wish you’d learn a better way to show it.”

Her phone lights up. Her dark eyes tick-tock back and forth as she reads.

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Speak of the devil.” She shows me the text, Daniel’s name on the screen. “Harmony gave up the ghost on the car. It’s on the reservation.”

I idle outside the trailer for hours, waiting for a text, a phone call, a news alert, a carrier pigeon,some kind of update. I watch the sun burn off the clouds and then I watch it dip below the horizon and then I watch the sky turn deep blue, speckled with stars like crushed velvet. The mosquitoes feast on my bare legs. I smack one as it attacks the skin around my moth tattoo, so ferociously that when I examine my palm, there is no longer any trace of its existence beyond a smear of blood.

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