Page 67 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Did you tell the cops she ran away?”

“No, but it’s because I’ve heard on all the podcasts—literally every single one I listen to, I swear—they don’t look for runaways,” she says. “It’s not illegal to run away, so the cops care less. I thought if I told them, they wouldn’t look hard enough. They would think,well, there goes another local drunk, and close the case.”

As I join her on the ground, her head heavy against my shoulder, her hand clammy in my own, I speculate aboutHarmony. If she found out our mother was running away, maybe she felt betrayed, and maybe the natural response to such an inconceivable blow to the psyche is an equally inconceivable crime. We forget what a mortal wound it is to be forsaken by someone whose blood you share, a person whose existence is inseparable from your own, bound to you by cosmic divination rather than choice. You exist within them and they within you. They echo through your marrow eternally.

In my mind’s eye, I answer my mother’s phone call. She says,Stop haunting me, Providence, and then she hangs up. I call her back again and again, but the number has been disconnected. Instead of my mother’s voice, there is only a dial tone.

Grace turns to me with a drawn mouth. It’s the first time I have been close enough to see the faint freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks. I see so much of myself in her that I want to apologize. I hope her resemblance to me does not condemn her to a similarly doomed life. We come from the same parents, from the same home, share the same appearance—and can a rosebush ever grow any flower but a rose?

“I need to go home.” Grace uses the tree trunk to pull herself to her feet. She dusts the dirt and twigs from her dress, but nothing can be done about the chokecherry stains. “If I’m not there when Dad gets back …”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I know.”

As she takes her first steps back to the house, my heart catches in my throat. “Grace, wait.”

“What is it?”

“Can I give you a hug?”

The smallest of smiles warms her face. “Of course. I love hugs.”

It is the first time in years a hug has brought me joy. She hugs me tighter than I expect, and once I steady my breathing, I surrender wholly to the embrace. I never want to let go.

She speaks into my shoulder, her voice a half whisper. Maybe she doesn’t want me to hear it, but I do. “I wish it was you here instead of Harmony.”

At the sheriff’s office, I anticipate resistance when I ask to see Harmony, but the deputy smiles, nods, and guides me to the shoebox-like visitation room without a word. I’m relieved not to be in the interrogation room again. I never spent time in the visitation room because no one came to visit before my sentencing, except the overworked public defender in such a rush to see me before the day ended she forgot her purse at the jail in Alliance and couldn’t go more than two minutes without mentioning it. “It was Louis Vuitton,” she said, “brand new, leather.” She wanted me to thank her for the valiant sacrifice. I never did.

Harmony’s jumpsuit is candy apple red. The way she shuffles into the room makes me think she is cuffed at the ankles too, but no, only the wrists. “I’m touched,” she says as she takes her seat across the metal table. “I thought you’d have run back home and long forgotten me by now.” She walks her index and middle fingers across the table.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Bite me,” she says. “I was being genuine.”

“Even when you’re sincere, you sound like you hate me.”

Her hands are cuffed just far enough apart for her to crack her neck, a motion she makes with enough speed and force to sever her spinal cord. She allows her head to loll forward and rotates in a semicircle from shoulder to shoulder. Her vertebrae never stop crackling. “You want something,” she says. “What is it?”

From here on out, I have to tread with caution. I’m certain our conversation is being monitored somehow, and I can’t let it slip that Grace withheld information from the police, even if those details have ceased to be relevant. Odds are, no one isgoing to bring down the hammer and charge her with obstruction, but I need to keep her as far from the fray as possible.

“Have you been up to the attic lately?”

“Oh, all the time. Weekly seances and everything. Summoning our dead grandma from the urn on the mantle. She says hi, by the way.”

It’s not a question of Harmony being smart enough to realize I’m speaking in code, but whether she is shrewd enough to understand why I need her to play along. “I was thinking about it the other day,” I say. “I’m sure all of our old keepsakes are up there.”

“Yeah, like the old man’s favorite belt to hit us with.”

“His favorite Bible to preach fire and brimstone from.”

Her laugh singes the air. “King James Version.”

“Do you think Mom would ever give us any of the old shit?”

“She cleaned out the attic a few weeks ago. Spring cleaning in the summer. You know how she was. She gave me a box.”

“Something to remember her by?”

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