Page 99 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“Providence.”

“My leg—”

“Leg, schmeg. You’re going.”

I straighten my afflicted leg out on the picnic blanket and finger the bullet scar, and then the scars dotting my arms. I’m gradually learning how to stop hiding my scars beneath my sleeves. I’m tired of the secrecy and the shame. If I would not hesitate to show people the bullet scar, why should I hesitate to show them the bite mark scars? Both are acts of violence, against myself and against another, but violence nonetheless. I want to leave the shame in Annesville. “Is it appropriate for me to be there? It’s your tribe, your celebration. Your people.”

She sits across from me and Zenobia, rubbing the dog’s nose with her foot. “It’s appropriate as long as I’m inviting you.”

“I don’t know, Sara.”

“You’ve seen a lot of sadness on the reservation,” she says. “I know it’s hard to see anything else. Shit, I’m all doom and gloom. But you should see the joy too. There’s nothing like it.”

And of course, my dearest friend is right. Thewacipiis unlike anything I’ve ever seen. In a meadow, inexplicably green and lush despite the brownness of the earth surrounding it, hundreds of people dressed in kaleidoscopic tribal regalia dance to the airs of drummers and singers. Sara walks me through the maze of people cooking traditional Lakota foods. She points out thewojapi(and insists hers is the best), thewohanpisoup of bison and potatoes and turnips, thewasnabars made of jerky and dried cranberries. Artists display handmade jewelry and beadwork in kaleidoscopic colors. Sara buys me a dreamcatcher with different shades of green used for the hoop, net, and feathers.

“I think you’re going to need this,” she says as she eases it into my purse.

She introduces me to a collection of cousins, one of whom asks what happened to my arms. I tell him I lost a fight with a snapping turtle, and he laughs. A few of them steal looks at my tattoos, but no one else comments. I take a picture of them, Sara standing in the middle, brilliant like a supernova, a woman who is exactly where she belongs.

Eventually, I excuse myself to rest on the nearby bleacher. I massage the scar to ease the epicenter of the pain, but it diffuses down into my calf and my foot. I tell myself when the pain finally goes away, so too will the nightmares, but I know it isn’t true.

“Hi, Providence.”

It’s Scarlett. I could recognize those orange braces from a county away. She ascends the bleachers like a staircase and sits on the row below me. Her lips are tinted from her popsicle, artificial raspberry with a smell sugary enough to make my stomach clench. She sprinkles salt on it from the tiny packet in her hand before taking her next lick.

I scrunch my nose. “Salt on a popsicle?”

“It sounds gross, but it’s so good. Like olive oil on ice cream.”

“That also sounds gross,” I say.

“As my dad would say, don’t knock it ’til you try it.”

Not long after I was discharged from the hospital, when my days were still just one medication-induced nap after the other, Sara checked Daniel into the rehab facility in Rapid City. I insisted she take the money that Gil gave me to help pay for it. “Pretend it’s from an anonymous Good Samaritan,” I told her. I can’t undo my decision to leverage someone else’s addiction for my own gain (that callousness may haunt me forever), but I can play a part, however small, in helping them heal.

Scarlett reads my mind. “I’m not, like, mad at you or Aunt Sara. I’m not even mad at him. I just want him to be healthy. I think it’s a disease.”

“It is,” I tell her as she salts the popsicle again. “My mother had it.”

“But she never got better.”

“No, she didn’t. But she didn’t have people in her corner like your dad does.”

In the grass, the dancers begin a whirlwind choreography that leaves me breathless just watching. “That’s what Aunt Sara says,” Scarlett murmurs dreamily, “that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is having people who love you.”

People love me. I am lovable.

Sara is somehow still hungry when we leave thewacipi. We pick up a pizza on the way home and eat it on her bed like teenage girls at a sleepover, the dogs pawing at our closed door. Sara consumes her slices crust-first. She laughs when I scold her for eating in a supine position. “If I choke to death on a slice of mushroom pizza,” she says, “I deserve it. Just please make sure my headstone says something nice.”

“Here lies Sara Walking Elk—sister, aunt, friend, and car thief.”

“Carlarcenist,” she corrects. “It sounds more intriguing that way.”

“Is my favorite carlarcenistgoing to come visit me in Kansas City?” I ask.

“Only if you pay for a five-star hotel room.”

“I’m being serious, Sara. I don’t … I don’t think I can come back here ever again. The triggers would kill me.”

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