Page 43 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

We make the bed with fresh linens, but before I can retreat into my cocoon of grief, Sara leads me into the living room. Ihad forgotten how bright the rest of the trailer is. She seats me at the dining room table with thewojapiand frybread. “Eat, then get dressed. You’ll answer the sheriff’s questions, and then you can resume hibernation.”

“Do you have something black I can borrow? Something you’d wear for a funeral?”

“I have plenty of those. My family drops like flies.”

The dress is laughable. It covers every inch of my skin from the neck down, my cleavage tucked safely beneath the jewel neckline and my legs hidden in fabric puddling on the floor beneath me. I look more like the grim reaper than a daughter bereaving her mother. Despite how ridiculous it is, I am grateful my costume is such a shameless display of sorrow. I want the sheriff to see me as a woman in mourning and not as a former felon who is scared to death to be questioned by the police.

I meet Josiah at the front gate. Here I am, nothing to hide. His cruiser reads K-9 UNIT—STAY BACK, but the threat of canine intervention is an empty one with no police dog in sight. He tips his cowboy hat as he gets out of the car, pausing to survey the agglomeration of trailers surrounding us. “Jesus,” he says in the direction of adolescent boys clamoring around a basketball hoop. They are laughing and smiling, happy as children should be, nothing like the boy who found my mother. “We never did right by the Indians out here.”

“That’s an understatement.”

He gestures to theBEWARE OF DOGsign hanging from Sara’s front gate. “May I come in?”

“The dogs won’t be a problem. My friend is in another room keeping an eye on them.”

Josiah frowns. “She won’t be eavesdropping, I hope?”

I know better than to talk to cops alone. Without the time or money to recruit a lawyer, Sara eavesdropping from anotherroom is the next best thing. “He has to stop when you say you want a lawyer,” she’d said as she herded the dogs into her bedroom. “It doesn’t matter if you’re not being Mirandized. I’ll come out there and tell him where he can stick it if you need me to.”

“She’s got pretty good ears, but that’s not a crime,” I tell him.

The dogs yowl as he crosses the threshold, sensing an unwelcome intruder in our midst. Josiah pays them no mind as he settles in at the head of the table. He spreads the contents of a manila folder before him, pictures and notes and typed documents I can’t decipher without asking questions or getting too close. Josiah’s every move is a trap until proven otherwise. As he licks his fingers and flicks through papers, I remember the first time he responded to a 911 call at our house. I was seven, too young to understand why the bedroom door was locked and why my mother was crying and sayingstop, but old enough to know something was wrong. My father palmed my shoulders before he let the sheriff in. “The police aren’t your friends, Providence. They’ll punish you if you get something wrong. Think long and hard before you say anything to them.”

“Smells like an ashtray in here.” He thinks I don’t notice him turning on a recorder.

“Just me.”

Josiah’s mouth quirks into a smile, then flattens into a solemn line. “Before I ask you anything, I want to offer my condolences. I really thought she was still … I’m sorry any of this had to happen. Honest to God, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Do you remember much from the book of Matthew?” he asks.

“‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’”

My recitation impresses him. “The seventh beatitude. Do you remember the fifth?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I say.

“‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ I read it last night, and you came to mind.”

“Did I?”

“I know your relationship with your mom was difficult,” he says. “Hell,difficultain’t even the half of it. But you’ve still lost your mother, and you’re allowed to mourn too. Your sisters don’t have a monopoly on grief.”

I want to dismiss the words, but the comfort I reap from them is too great. I turn to the window so he can’t see the tears welling in my eyes. Where was this fatherly warmth when I needed it all those years ago? I shake away the thought. He’s playing the good cop, buttering me up, coaxing me into letting my guard down. I won’t fall for it. “I appreciate that, sheriff,” I say.

“What I want to start with … it’s nothing nice, I’ll be frank. But I think you deserve to know exactly what happened to your mother.”

He slides a sheet of paper in front of me before I can ask him to spare me the gory details. The genderless human diagram is riddled with Xs to denote my mother’s injuries. The medical jargon is impossible for me to decipher—pulmonary laceration, diaphragmatic rupture?—but I don’t ask him to explain for fear of looking stupid.

“Your mother’s pattern of injury was consistent with being hit by a car. She suffered blunt force trauma to the head and torso.” He points a nicotine-stained finger at the head of the diagram. “Might have been manslaughter, but we’re learning toward homicide because her body was transported to the woods and disposed of.”

I stare at the coroner’s report. Josiah waits for me to speak, but my tongue has turned to stone. No matter what I say, he will manipulate my words and sand down their edges until they fitinto the version of the story he has already decided on. I am more fearful now than I was at seventeen when I was handcuffed and Mirandized.

Who better to blame for hitting my mother with a car than me?

Josiah clears his throat. “How long have you been here, Miss Byrd?”

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