Page 40 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Zoe white-knuckles the steering wheel with her free hand. She drives at precisely the speed limit. Once a square, always a square. “It reminded me of something your mom would do.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“That’s not who she was. She was …”

“I don’t think you knew her anymore.”

“She was still an alcoholic. She was still letting my father abuse my sisters. She was still the same at her core,” I say. “Grace told me she was hooked on oxy too.”

“You always said addiction was a disease.”

I ball my free hand into a fist and look out the window. Trees populate the horizon as we near the town of Long Grass, our drive approaching its end. “It doesn’t mean I have to forgive her for it.”

“She knew about us,” she says.

“No, she didn’t.”

Zoe finally meets my eyes. The sidelong look distracts her from the road long enough for her truck to judder over the center rumble strip. “She came to my office a few months ago,” she says once the truck is squarely back on its side of the road. “I figured she was coming to ask about the VA office in Carey Gap they’ve been promising for years. People either complain to meabout that or about their property taxes. Anyway, she said my mom called her that night. When we …”

“When we kissed.”

“When we kissed.” Hearing her call the act by its name, even if she’s only parroting me, is healing in itself. “So she knew. All these years, she knew, and she never threw the Bible at me, or made me feel guilty, or treated me any differently. She just came into my office that day and said, ‘I really don’t understand it, but I’m glad you made my daughter happy.’ ”

“I’m glad my mother could absolve you of your homosexual guilt.”

Zoe frowns. “Way to miss the point.”

“And what is the point, Zoe? That you got to have the heartfelt conversation with my mother I never did? That when she found out I’d been with another girl, she offered you her acceptance instead of me?” But I realize instantly that my mother used the only power she had to accept me: silence. The catastrophic kiss happened a month before I ran my mother over. If Zoe’s mom really called her the night it happened, if my mother really knew all along about our tryst (and if she knew about the kiss, then who can say she didn’t know about the things we did in Zoe’s back seat?), she had an entire month to ruin me. Send me to the church for counseling. Ship me off to conversion therapy. Out me to my father, God forbid.

My intestines coil like a snake eating its own tail. My mother guarded my secret, and I repaid her discretion by breaking her bones.

Zoe opens her mouth to speak, but only a bewildered sigh slips out. “I thought you’d want to hear a happy memory I have of your mom.”

“It’s a happy memory I should have. Not you.”

“Sweet Christmas, forget I said anything.”

“At least it would have meant something to me,” I fire back.

“Don’t start.”

But I have started, and now I can’t stop. “Now you get to keep my mother’s approval in your pocket, something to cheer you up when you feel guilty about still being in the closet.”

“I’m not in the closet,” Zoe insists.

“What else do you call a girl who’s ashamed that she has sex with other girls?”

“We were teenagers. I was confused and lonely and … repressed.”

“So it was just a science experiment for you?”

We stop at a red light. After almost an hour of constant motion, the stillness makes me queasy. I need more distance between me and my mother’s dead body, more distance between me and the weeping boy. “We shouldn’t do this right now,” Zoe sighs. “You’re tired. You’re grieving. Now is not the time.”

I am too exhausted to argue more.

The dogs tear into the front yard when we pull up to the trailer. Sara’s car is gone, probably a few minutes behind us. My grief is catching up with me. I want to be asleep when we finally collide.

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