Page 29 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I want them to like me.”

“One dinner won’t make them like you.”

I pretend to be engrossed in selecting an eyeshadow to hide how deep the words cut. One dinner won’t make them like me, but sometimes loyalty demands self-sacrifice. My sisters need to know I haven’t forgotten what it means to be Tom Byrd’s daughter. They need to know I’m one of them too, not the turncoat they’ve imagined. Their horrors are my horrors.

I dip my brush into the beige powder and dust it into the crease of my eyelid. “I know that,” I say after a moment.

“Family is overrated anyway.”

“At least you have them. At least if you died, you’d have more than just the priest show up at your funeral.”

Sara laughs, and I smile along with her, even though it wasn’t a joke. “I can think of three people who might show,” she says. “Me, that Kiera girl you’re always gushing about, and whoever you ran off to meet this morning.”

“Gil Crawford? He needs an act of God to make it to Christmas.”

“The guy who brought you the books, right? What’s wrong with him?”

“Alzheimer’s,” I say.

“Mykunsihad it. It’s like watching someone die in slow motion.” She shares a dolorous look with the dog, who mauls a rawhide bone dangerously close to my pillow. Ropes of slobber dangle from her jaws.

“No one deserves to get Alzheimer’s, of course, but Gil … he’s the only adult in my life who ever really loved me. It’s not fair for it to be him instead of my father, or Josiah Eastman, someone like that.” The shift in Sara’s mood is subtle enough to slip past the untrained eye, but after hundreds of hours locked in the same prison cell, I have her emotional tells memorized. “If you have something to say, go ahead and say it.”

“Gil knew about your dad.”

“Everyone did, Sara. It wasn’t a secret that my sisters and I were mistreated.” Immediately I regret using the wordmistreated, but the euphemisms make it easier to talk about. I can either minimize my suffering, or I can never talk about it at all.

“It’s nice he fed you dinner and helped you with homework and bought you presents at Christmas, but he’s no hero. He still let you go home every day.”

“He did what he could.”

“He knew you were being abused.” Sara lowers herself onto the air mattress beside me. It seems like a gesture from an older sister, the type of bonding moment I could have shared with Harmony or Grace if my life had taken a different turn. “I know you love him, but he could have done more for you.”

“I could say the same about a lot of people.”

We ease into silence. Sara rests her head in the curve between my neck and my collarbone, her hand clasping mine. I have spent years starved for simple affection like this. My friends back home will send me a text to make sure I’ve gotten home safe after a night out and bring me groceries while I recover from surgery, but I’ve never been able to melt fully into their arms the way I can with Sara. She sees me. She knows me. She loves me.

“It’s not your fault,” Sara says. “None of it is.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure you do. I just don’t think you’ve ever heard someone else say it.”

I don’t recognize the house when I step inside. It’s like looking through a funhouse mirror and trusting that, improbable as it may seem, this is the same place I spent the first seventeen years of my life.

The only familiar thing is the treacly scent wafting from the kitchen. Grace is baking chokecherry pie, the recipe passed to her from our mother, to our mother from our grandmother, and so on up the maternal line. I never learned the recipe myself. Like our mother, Grace turns the kitchen into a war zone as she cooks, utensils strewn across the black laminated countertop and soiled dishes wedged into the sink like Tetris blocks, cabinet doors left open in her wake. A peek into the refrigerator confirms my fear I will have to suffer through tuna noodle casserole for dinner.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, sweeping the toast crumbs from the counter into the sink. I need to feel useful. Anything to distract myself from the knot in my stomach, tighter than a noose. Outside the window above the sink, the rusty windchimes tinkle. Air conditioning is a luxury not offered in the Byrd house. Unless there’s a tornado warning, every window stays open all summer long.

Grace snaps on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and bumps me out of the way with her hip. She scrubs the dishes at world record speed. Our father hates coming home to a dirty kitchen. “Harmony will be late to her own funeral. And Dad …” She glances at the microwave clock. “Liquor store is still open for another ten minutes. He’s closing early just for this.”

“Can I help?”

She drops a fork into the dishwasher with a clang. “There’s a water dish for the cat out by the shed. It probably needs to be refilled.”

“He lets you have a cat?”

“Just a stray I feed.”

---