Page 48 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I never implied otherwise.”

“And I have people. I have friends. But most of them aren’t here. They’re in Kansas City, and I’m here with my dead mother, and … I feel very lonely right now. Like I’m on a deserted island.”

The road is empty. It isn’t quite nine o’clock, but the sidewalks in Tyre have already rolled up. The pool hall is the only building still lit, a lighthouse at the mouth of a blackened sea. Daniel grabs a plastic bag from the back seat in case I need to vomit, which, given the frequency and depth of the potholes we rumble over, seems inevitable.

“I wish I had more people who loved me,” I tell him.

“It won’t always be this way,” he says when we pull onto the highway. In the rearview mirror, Tyre is a ghost town. “You’re still young. You’ll get married. You’ll have kids. You’ll be part of a family.”

“No one marries felons and I got my tubes removed.”

“Sara said you were a lesbian.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“You’re not my type,” he says, like he’s rejecting me. As if there’s between us anything to reject. “I mention it because if you don’t sleep with men, why get your tubes removed?”

“So I don’t become the victim of the second immaculate conception.”

“Don’t be glib.”

I roll down my window to invite in the tepid summer night. The fresh air rolls through the car like the nausea through my body. “I got my tubes removed because I don’t want kids. Simple. Don’t overthink it. I’m sure I look like perfect mother material to you anyway.”

“Some people would say you did this to yourself.”

“Youwould say I did this to myself.”

He shifts in his seat.

“I always thought at some point the world would stop punishing me for what I did to my mother, but every day it … I don’t know. I never get to move on. You think it ends when you get out of prison, and then you think it ends when you’re off parole, but then you realize you can’t have the job you want and you can’t live in a decent apartment, and forget going to college … and then your mom is dead.” I say it without thinking.Mom.“And then your peace lilies are dying too. What’s it all for? Why are we here and what’s the meaning of life? There. Now I’m being glib.”

“What did you want out of life when you were young?”

“I wanted to be an astronaut.”

He narrows his eyes at me, unsure if I’m being a smart-ass or if I’m being genuine.

“If you knew something about my mother …” I trail off and whisper the word to myself, committing the movements of my mouth to memory, the way my lips constrict on themand part ontheth, how therjudders in the back of my throat.Mother.Not mom. It tastes wrong. Mom is poison. Mom is acid. Mom is a chokecherry pit.Mother. Mother.“If you knew something about what happened to her that I didn’t, would you tell me?”

“Certain things I can’t talk about.”

I tense my jaw. “So you do know something.”

“Anything I tell you is only half the story. The other half you’ll have to get out of Sheriff Eastman.”

“I haven’t told Sara about the bourbon,” I say. “Give me a reason to keep it that way.”

He searches my face for any hint that this is my drunken idea of a joke. “Sheriff Eastman is looking into everyone who was at the church the day your mother went missing. There’s a couple of landscapers who aren’t too keen on talking to police.”

“Do you think they know something?”

“No. My guess is they’re undocumented and think they’ll get deported if they talk to the police.”

“And what about my father? Are they still doing a poly … the lie detector test?”

“Polygraph,” he supplies.

“Yeah, polygraph.”

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