Page 31 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

CHAPTER 30

September 10 th

8:46 AM

G R ACE PARES HER life 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 cycle of 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.”