Page 13 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

He talks as I help myself to a scalding cup of coffee. It’s only ten and the trailer is already miserably hot, but I crave caffeine nearly as much as I do a cigarette. “I wanted to stop by on my way to the station,” he says. “The divers searched the lake, but it was too murky to see more than the hand in front of their faces.”

“Will they try again another day?”

He shakes his head. “Visibility won’t improve. Just how that lake is. You couldn’t see the Loch Ness Monster down there.”

“Maybe it’d be better to drag it.”

From the stove, Sara grunts. Her shoulders are tense, the crease between her eyebrows deepening. “It’s sacred to our people. No one’s dragging Sungila Lake.”

Daniel begins to respond but thinks better of it. “We have patrols at the main roads leading in and out of the reservation. If she’s still in her vehicle, we’ll find her.”

“But it’s unlikely,” I say.

“It’s unlikely.”

“I saw my sister last night. She—”

Sara heaps the bacon, crispy enough to shatter, onto a plate. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Which sister?”

“Grace.”

“And Grace is the …?” asks Daniel.

“The younger one,” I say. “She got in some trouble and—well, she called me. She said our mother gave her my number a few weeks ago so she could call me in case of an emergency.”

For a few moments, no one speaks. Sara rations out the bacon across three plates and seats herself at the head of the table. She reaches for her ashtray, but a sharp look from her brother stops her.

“You’ll have to enlighten me on your family dynamics, Providence,” Daniel says.

“My mother wouldn’t have wanted them to contact me. When she came to my parole hearing, she asked me never to contact my sisters, told me she’d forbid them from speaking my name, cut me out of the family pictures … run of the mill stuff when you’re disowned.”

Sara breaks a piece into thirds and tosses one to each dog. It induces a piranha-like feeding frenzy. “Pretty reasonable response considering you ran the woman over with her own car.”

“It was my father’s car,” I correct. The two of them look at me perplexed, but the detail always felt important to me. She never owned a house or a car, never had her own credit card. Everything in my mother’s life belonged to her husband. “What I’m trying to say is, my mother wouldn’t have given Grace my phone number for the hell of it. She had to know something bad was going to happen.”

“That,” says Daniel, spreading his hands apart in a contemplative gesture, “or maybe she was planning to run away.”

“From what Grace told me, my mother probably wouldn’t go more than half an hour away from the doctors filling her oxy prescriptions for the last thirteen years.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “I’m sorry—your mother has been taking oxycodone forthirteen years?”

I swallow the pebble of guilt in my throat. “Ever since I hit her with the car, apparently.”

“Would anyone outside your family know about it?”

“Everyone knows my parents are drunks. I don’t see why they wouldn’t know this either,” I say.

“We don’t have any medical records for Elissa.” Daniel leans back in his chair, his fingers interlocked behind his head. “Sheriff Eastman wouldn’t share them.”

“He’s protecting my father,” I say.

“What’s your dad got on him?”

“It’s never been a matter of what my father has on people. It’s always about what he’ll do to people. Kill your dog. Fire a bulletthrough your window. Shoot you in the neck. He beat the shit out of Sheriff Eastman once, before he was a cop. He thought Josiah hustled him at a pool game. Supposedly he fucked his wife too, years later. That one’s probably just an urban legend.”

“Okay, let’s try this,” he says, unamused by my tangent. “Any idea who your mother’s doctor was?”

“We’re estranged. What do you think?”

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