Page 69 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I don’t give a fuck about the ring,” I snap. “Where is the car?”

“Don’t worry your Botoxed little head about it.”

“Harmony, please.”

She yells for the deputy. He whisks her out of the room, down the short hallway to the cells. I shout at her one last time before she makes the turn.

“Where is the goddamn car?”

CHAPTER

20

August 21st

7:46AM

THERE ISAlottery for spectators to get into the courtroom. The line weaves around the courthouse and into the parking lot it shares with the local drugstore, each person clutching their ticket like they’re hoping to tour Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, not watch an arraignment that will last all of five minutes. I can tell they’re all locals. The press may not be interested in my mother’s death, but the people of Tillman County are.

The courthouse is a blocky brick building. Local folklore credits God himself with its construction in the late nineteenth century. The bricklayers ran out of bricks before they could finish the walls, and to complicate matters further, all the fuel stockpiled for the kiln had washed away in a thunderstorm. Dejected, defeated, staring down the black throat of winter, the bricklayers went to sleep in their tents beside the unfinished building—but when they woke the next morning, conveniently Easter Sunday, they saw threefold the bricks they needed to finish the courthouse.The miracle inspired them to build the second story. (God may have rested on the seventh day when he created the earth, but on the seventh day in Tillman County, he produced bricks out of thin air.) While everyone agrees on this facet of the story, there are no records as to when the marble statue of Lady Justice—blindfolded, armed with her scales and sword—was placed in front of the courthouse doors.

“Did I ever tell you the roof started leaking during my arraignment?”

Sara and I are waiting at the crosswalk. We parked almost half a mile away, and the kitten heels she let me borrow pinch my toes with every step. I’ve borrowed yet another dress from her, this one tea length, long-sleeved, and the same shade of rich blue you see on the rooftops of houses in Greece. This morning, I’d been paralyzed thinking of how precisely to make myself presentable not just for the courtroom, but for onlookers who would recognize me and the reporters who might take my picture. Sara took charge and styled me, and though I now look like the wife of a youth pastor, I am grateful to have one less distraction to contend with.

“You never mentioned it,” I say.

“Water started dripping onto the stand. It was a few drops at first, but by the end, it was coming down so hard it splashed the judge in the face.” Sara smiles up at the overcast sky, as if to thank the clouds for their cooperation. “Maybe the same thing’ll happen for Harmony.”

“God willing.”

“Are you okay? You look pale.”

I shake my head as we cross the street. “I’m going to puke.”

“Let’s sit for a second,” she says.

“I don’t want to be late.”

“We’ve got time. You don’t want to vomit while she’s making her plea.” Sara steers me toward a bus stop bench, occupied at one end by a woman reading a romance book with a shirtless,chiseled man on the front. She wedges a plastic bag of groceries between herself and Sara. “Talk me through it. What are you thinking?”

“You’ve heard the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’?”

“My dog is named Julius.”

I want to chuckle, but the most I can muster is a sharp exhale through my nose. “My father used to say it. We’re going to go in there and she’s going to cross the Rubicon. She can’t come back from whatever she does here.”

“Did she say how she’d plead?”

The woman leans closer, still pretending to flip through her book.

“No,” I say.

“She likes to keep people guessing, doesn’t she?”

“She’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”

A leathery hand gropes my shoulder. I jump like I’ve received an electric shock. My father has never looked this sophisticated, not even in the pictures I’ve seen of my parents’ wedding. His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back, heavy with pomade, and his oxford button-up is free of wrinkles and creases. To anyone who doesn’t know him, Tom Byrd looks like an average man, and his averageness will be captured in photos, disseminated to people who cannot fathom the evil beating inside. They will sympathize with him as an ordinary person caught in the crossfire of larger-than-life tragedies, trapped in a waking nightmare.First his daughter, they will say, mouths agape,then his wife, and now his other daughter?

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