Page 97 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

I nod at her piecemeal question. She leaves the room and not ten seconds later, Josiah comes in. He bears his cowboy hat in his hands like he has come to pay his respects at my funeral.

“… okay?” He pulls up a chair at my bedside and I hide my hands beneath the blankets.

My mouth is dry. The words won’t come. Josiah offers me a plastic cup of water and I drink from it in tiny sips, a dove at a birdbath. He is too polite to comment, but he gawks at my scarred arms.

“… lot of … to see you.”

I tap on my ear. “I can’t hear very well.”

He repositions his chair to the other side of the bed and leans toward me, keeping his words soft. “The nurse said the hearing loss is temporary,” he says. “Lots of folks came to see you. They’re all in the waiting room, whole pack of ’em. Grace, Zoe Markham, your friend from the reservation …”

“I don’t think I should ask what brought you here.”

“Not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not really in the mood for being coy.”

He slices the air with a flattened palm, as if to sayno worries, I got it.“Your father, you mean? Whole thing was self-defense. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“He shot you, Providence. The knife? If you didn’t do it to him, what was he going to do to you?”

My head is still underwater, thoughts hazy, but the memory of the knife in my father’s neck unfurls with perfect clarity. My shoulders ache from stabbing him so many times.

“You weren’t there.”

“Oh, I was. Karishma Jadhav called this morning, said you’d be at the liquor store. She was worried you’d get hurt. I got there in the nick of time to see it happen.”

“Why are you doing this?” I whisper. “Why are you lying for me?”

“Just doing what we both know is right,” he says. “Besides, there was a man outside the store who saw it too. He and I agree we saw the same thing. The one who stopped the bleeding, remember?” Josiah’s knees crack when he stands. He inhales through gritted teeth.

“People might ask questions.”

“I think it’s an open secret no one in Annesville was going to shed a tear when Tom Byrd met the reaper.”

My father is in hell. I sent him there. The thought brings the faintest smile to my lips.

“I’d offer a penny for your thoughts, but you never were too hard to read.”

“My mother was the inscrutable one.”

At that, Josiah smiles. “The preacher promised me he’d work on a headstone for Elissa. It’ll take a few weeks, but he’s going to put it under the chokecherry tree, facing west so she can watch the sunsets.”

“Her ashes are mine now, aren’t they?”

“The house and everything in it are yours. I know everyone else in his family is gone, and frankly, your father didn’t seem like the type to have a will.”

My father starts slurring in my mind, but his voice is already fading.

“Tell the preacher I want her ashes buried,” I say to Josiah. “She can be the first Byrd woman buried at the church.”

The first and, God willing, the last.

I am warm from morphine. My body cries out for sleep. Connor tries to see me, but I turn him away. I drift off during Sara’s visit, and when I wake, it is Grace in the room with me.

She sleeps on a cot beneath the window, curled up like a wounded fawn. She has eaten the pudding a nurse brought for me earlier in the night. The empty pouch lies on the floor beside her shoes and her backpack. It is scuffed and discolored, bulging with books and binders. Her life should have been so much simpler. We’ve robbed her of childhood. We’ve forced her to grow up long before she should have. For all the times she reminded me she was no longer a child, she didn’t understand how much less painful her world would be if she was. She should be studying for midterms and buying a dress for prom. Instead, she sleeps beside me in a hospital room, motherless, fatherless, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic tones of the machines to which I am attached.

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