Page 28 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

She claps her hands together, squeezing tight enough to drain the color from her fingers. “Providence, please. I don’t want to talk about this. We’re here for your mom, okay? We shouldn’t lose focus on that.”

She takes off in long, loping strides that make it clear she isn’t going to wait for me if I fall behind. I have no choice but to follow.

Whatever compassion Zoe had for me earlier has long dried up by the time the search concludes. Like the first, this search unearths no trace of my mother’s whereabouts, and everyone is sunburned, exhausted, and grumpy when they disperse to their cars. She bids me a hasty goodbye before climbing into her truck. She’s the first one back on the road.

I’m aiming to be the second one out of the makeshift parking lot when my father knocks his knuckles against my window. I only roll down the window a few inches.

“What? Your windows don’t work?”

“The air’s on,” I lie. “I don’t want to let the cold out.”

My father spits onto the dirt, then wipes the viscous remnants from his lips. Beads of sweat roll down his giant nose, steady like the drip of a leaky faucet. He huffs and puffs for a moment before speaking. “What you got going on this evening?”

“Why?”

“I’m having your sisters over for dinner. I’d like you there too. Been too long since I’ve had all three of my girls under my roof, and … to tell you the truth, Providence, it’d make your mother happy to know you tried to be part of the family again.”

I open my mouth to reject this moronic, horrifying, insulting request, but stop myself. This is my chance to prove to Grace that I’m not useless. Suffering through one evening as a buffer between her and our father, her and Harmony, choking down the foul plateful of tuna noodle casserole our father will invariably serve—it’s the least I can do to atone for my many misdeeds.

It’ll just be a few hours. I can handle it.

He reads my mind. “See you at six, butterfly.”

CHAPTER

10

August 12th

4:55PM

AS EMOTIONALLY UNPREPAREDas I am for my impending dinnertime rendezvous, I am also physically unprepared. The nicest clothing I brought from home is a blue button-down shirt I wear to gay bars to show women I’m not a straight girl who made a wrong turn. I can’t wear it. My father will say I look like a lesbian. If I dressed too conservatively as a teenager, he called me a lesbian; too scantily, he called me a slut. I beg Sara for something to borrow and she obliges me with a dandelion yellow dress that hides my cleavage and flares from the waist. I look like a sweaty Easter egg.

“I think you should cancel,” Sara calls from the dining room. She hunches over her checkbook while I sit cross-legged in front of the mirrored closet door to finish my makeup. As I feather blush across my cheeks, I notice my smile lines are a touch more pronounced than they should be for a thirty-year-old, and rather than vowing to give up the vice causing my premature aging (cigarettes), I make a mental note to look into stronger dermal fillerswhen I go home. With the tattoos, I alter my body as a canvas, but with the cosmetic enhancements, I remake myself. Nature does not dictate my appearance: I do. The more I change about my appearance, the less I resemble the frightened seventeen-year-old in my mugshot, the easier it becomes to convince myself that my pain happened to someone else. Piece by piece, I chip away at who I once was. Lift my eyebrows. File my jawline. Freeze my forehead. Enhance my lips. Enlarge my breasts. The most recognizable feature I’ve kept intact is my enormous nose. I’ve made half a dozen consultations with plastic surgeons, but I can never bring myself to pull the trigger. I tell myself it’s because the surgeon must break my nose to fix it and the thought makes me queasy. Really, it’s because I don’t know if I’m ready to be completely unrecognizable to myself just yet.

“If you have arsenic you want me to sprinkle on my father’s plate, I’m happy to oblige.”

“I’m serious, Providence.”

Zenobia wanders into the bedroom and stretches out across the air mattress, her tail drumming against my pillow. I can’t decide if she’s fond of me or if I’ve accidentally stolen her favorite sleeping spot. I surmise the answer when she ignores my outstretched hand.

“Hello?”

“I’m listening,” I say.

“I don’t think you are. It’s a—I mean, you’re in therapy. I don’t know what your therapist is like, but mine says it’s important to avoid triggers. For me it’s graveyards. Makes me think of my dead family. But for you, spending time with your dad is probably the trigger to end all triggers.”

She’s right, of course. As the hour draws nearer, the moment I will have to ring the doorbell of my childhood home creeping close, I am unspooling from anxiety—but admitting it would be a failure. I’m supposed to be stronger now, the way steel must be forged in fire before it can become a sword.

“Do you want me to do the thing they do in movies?” Sara rests her shoulder against the doorframe. She extends a cigarette toward me, but I shake my head. “I call you half an hour into dinner, fake an emergency, you have to begrudgingly abandon your long-lost family to rescue a friend in need …”

“We’re friends?”

She smirks. “Screw you. I’m following girl code.”

“It’s going to be a miserable experience,” I say as I pry open an eyeshadow palette, “but at least my sisters won’t think I’m completely worthless.”

“What do you care what they think?”

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