Page 100 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

She sets down her pizza slice to take my hands. My fingers slot perfectly between hers. I’ve never been a believer in soulmates, but I think that’s because I’ve understood the word all wrong. A soulmate doesn’t have to be a lover. It can be someone like Sara, a friend who loves you even during the moments you are impossible to like. “I promise I’ll come visit. I’ll visit so often, you’ll start begging for the days where we only sent birthday cards. It’s my honor and privilege to be a thorn in your side, Providence Byrd.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

“Tell me something happy then. Tell me the first thing you and Grace are going to do when you get to Kansas City.”

In less than twenty-four hours, I will be driving back to Missouri, Grace in the passenger seat, whatever earthly possessions we can fit in the trunk and back seat rattling along with us for the ten-hour drive. The thought fills me with as much terror as it does joy. Josiah and Zoe called in every favor they had to expedite the custody process. The court named me Grace’s legal guardian in record time.

“We’re going out for dinner,” I say. “Kansas City barbecue is world-famous. And then I’m …”

“Come on, spit it out.”

“I’m going to think about enrolling in community college with her next year, as ridiculous as that sounds.”

“It’s not ridiculous. It’s brave,” she says.

“There’s nothing brave about a remedial math class.”

“Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is start over.”

A fresh start, for Grace and for me. Two orphan sisters slowly unshackling themselves from their traumatic pasts. We don’t have much, but we will always have each other. I think that can be enough.

And the Lord said unto Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?”

And he said, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Happily, I will be my sister’s keeper.

CHAPTER

30

September 10th

8:46AM

GRACE PARES HERlife down to a suitcase, a duffel bag, and the box of memories our mother left for her. There is nothing else for us to keep. We leave our father’s sports paraphernalia on the walls to collect dust, his tuna noodle casserole in the fridge to mold, his clothes in the closet to be nibbled on by moths.

We are the fourth generation of Byrds to live in the saltbox house on Cedar Street, and now we are the last. Everyone thinks I should sell the house. “Other people can come in and make happy memories,” Zoe said during her brief hospital visit. But I cannot bear the thought of another family roaming these halls, sleeping in these bedrooms, walking over the dead spot on the landing, cooling their pies on the windowsill. They will erase my existence from this home. They will never know the horrors and the rare moments of joy over a chokecherry pie or a walk-off home run to finish a Rockies game. Our lives will be blotted out by theirs, Annesville writing us out of its story just as seamlessly it writes them in, and though this is as it should be, the natural cycleof moving on, I refuse to condemn us to this fate. This is our house, ours alone. We built it, and so too will we tear it down.

I plan to let it sit vacant for a while, and then I will demolish it. One day, when I’m ready, someone will purchase the land to start from scratch upon our ruins. Our legacy will live on in the family plot at the graveyard and in hushed retellings of urban legends, but no one else will ever live in our house.

Seated atop my car, I soak in the house one last time. Four walls of memories, screams lost in the attic rafters, tears soaked into the floorboards—all of it, left behind.For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Annesville, left behind. For the rest of my life, when someone asks me where I’m from, I will smile and tell them I’m from flyover country, a wide spot in the road, a paper town. I’m from nowhere.

I once thought no place but Annesville could ever be home, but home is not what you run from. It’s what you run toward.

Grace emerges from the backyard with a bundle of orange fur in her arms. “I found Bucket sleeping under the porch.”

She presents him to me like a wiseman bringing a gift to the manger. The cat barely acknowledges me before returning to Grace and rubbing his jowls against her chin. I can hear him purring from feet away.

“Can we take Bucket with us?” she asks.

I smile at the cat and then at my sister—my sweet, beautiful, gap-toothed sister. Our world has shifted forever on its axis. It is a triumph and a catastrophe all at once.

“Sure,” I say. “We can take the cat.”