Page 33 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I’m not saying—”

“Why can’t we talk about something normal? Like, why can’t you ask me about school, or about my friends, or if I have a boyfriend? I want to be normal for, like, five minutes. I don’t want to talk about this serious shit.”

“Don’t sayshit.”

“I’m almost eighteen,” Grace says. “You can stop treating me like a kid.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

It earns me a smile. The more I see the gap between her front teeth, the more it charms me.

We don’t speak again until Grace starts cutting the pie. “Do you ever … like, you’ll just be doing something normal, like folding laundry, and you start thinking about it? Things he’s done? And you can’t get it out of your head? It gets stuck there and I—I want to reach inside my skull and take out my brain so it stops.”

“For me it’s usually nightmares.”

“All the time?” she asks.

“Not always. I have a lot of sleeping problems.”

“Like what?”

“Someone so much as takes the first step up to my apartment and I’m wide awake. I sleep with a white noise machine to drown sounds out.”

“What’s your apartment like?” The dreamy look in her eyes tells me she isn’t asking to be polite, but to open a portal to a world outside Annesville. Grace’s universe is a tragically small one, existing almost entirely within the saltbox house on Cedar Street and under our father’s watchful eye.

“It’s small, just one bedroom, but it’s cozy. I filled it with plants so it would be bright and cheery—peace lilies, mostly. They’re my favorite. It has a fireplace too, but it doesn’t work, so I bought lots of candles to stick in there instead. But my favorite thing is the view from my bedroom. If I look hard enough, I can see the Missouri River, just barely.”

Her smile is small and sad. “I want to see a big river like that, not just the dribbling little creeks around here.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to show you someday.”

I envision it with painful clarity. As summer steals into fall and the trees turn the color of marmalade, we’ll drive out to the limestone bluffs halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis and have a picnic lunch on the banks of the river. I’ll bring a bottle of champagne for us to share because that seems like something a big sister should do, sneak her little sister her first sips of alcohol. Maybe we’ll talk, or maybe we’ll just pass the hours in blissful, easy silence, swathed in the warmth of each other’s company.

“Where would I sleep if there’s only one bedroom?”

“You’d take the bedroom and I’d sleep on the couch.” I look toward the stairs. My throat tightens. “It has a door, Grace.”

Grace shoos a moth away from the pie, but says nothing. In the living room, the television screen bathes Harmony and my father in harsh white light, the two of them engaged in seemingly lighthearted conversation. The camaraderie is a betrayal.

“What about Harmony? I bet she’d let you stay with her.”

Grace shakes her head furiously, like a swimmer trying to get water out of her ears. “I don’t want to live with Harmony.”

“Did she do something to you, Grace?”

“No, just … everything with Mom and Dad. She refuses to talk about it. I’m not even sure she talks about it in therapy.”

“At least she goes.”

“It doesn’t do her any good. If you’re going to therapy and you still try to kill yourself, what’s the point?” She clenches her eyes to wish away her last words. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t my secret to tell.”

“Mum’s the word.”

Grace hands me the plate with the largest slice of pie, clearly intended for our father, in a gesture of gratitude. From the living room, he bellows, “Come on, girls. Come be part of the family.”

It is there, in the living room—forks chiming against plates, baseball announcers prattling on about ERA and WHIP, my father chewing pie with his mouth open—that I really notice my mother’s absence. When I close my eyes, I picture her curled up in the rocking chair with her favorite shawl wound around her shoulders, a specterlike presence too drunk or too sad to make conversation. But she was always there.

“If I’d had sons,” my father says through a belch, “they’d be out there on Coors Field right now. I’d have raised three Tulowitzkis all by myself.”

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