Page 58 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

“I can’t see her. It will break me, Providence.”

I reach across the table for her hand, but she ignores me. Another little rejection. I can’t take them anymore, and so I suggest the unthinkable to prove my loyalty: “If you ever … if you ever wanted Dad to die, you could tell me.”

“Then you’re no better than him.”

“It isn’t the same,” I insist.

“Violence is still violence.”

But he deserves it. But the universe must be a just one. But the universe must mete out punishments to those most deserving. “I know the cops don’t help. The neighbors are useless. I’m saying if you needed him to stop forever, I would do it.”

I ache for her to say yes, not only because I want to play the hero, but because I need someone else to agree this is the only way our story can end. What is the alternative? For me to return to my meager existence, for my sisters to cobble together what pieces of a normal life they can still salvage, for the old man to die warm in his bed twenty years from now? Don’t violent deeds deserve violent consequences?

“By next summer,” she says, “I’ll be gone. Karishma and I are going to the community college in Scottsbluff together. I can move on.”

“You don’t move on, Grace. You wake up at three in the morning and suddenly you can’t breathe because you remember he’s still alive.”

She sets her jaw. “I’m not you.”

“I—”

“I want to go home. I want to be alone.”

I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone. The cereal boxes I haul into Sara’s trailer look like they have survived a tour in Afghanistan, crushed at the corners and bloated with air at the middle, the top of one torn open so I could shovel fistfuls of cornflakes in my mouth as I careened up the road to the reservation. Sara looks up from the couch where she toils away at a shapeless crochet project. “Jesus Christ, you look like you just walked through a minefield.”

“I got you more cornflakes.”

“I see that,” she says slowly, discarding the yarn ball beside her. The shift disturbs Julius, who protests by grumbling and slinking to the tile in front of the back door.

“I didn’t want you to think you had to cook for me every morning, and I knew we were out of cereal, so I wanted to buy you cornflakes.”

“Why don’t you set them on the table and then sit here with me?”

“Did you want cornflakes?” My voice cracks.

“You’re freaking me out.”

“My sister might have killed my mother.”

Sara transfers the boxes into her arms and drops them on the table. Cornflakes sprinkle onto the shag carpet, but neither of us (nor the dogs) move to clean them up. “Tell me what happened.”

“Harmony confessed, and it—it can’t be her, Sara. I don’t think it’s her, and I can’t let it be her either. It has to be my father.”

“Daniel says his alibi checked out.”

I spike the open box against the table. More cornflakes come flying out, confetti celebrating my suffering, and it is the final push I need to unravel. A piece of delicate, white flesh peeks out from beneath the shirtsleeve. The tantalizing vein throbs. “Fuck the alibi! I need it to be him.”

“It’s not him.”

“If it’s not him, he’s never going to be punished. Not for this. Not for anything. He’s going to live the rest of his life drunk and happy, and he’ll never suffer one single consequence.”

“He’ll burn in hell,” she says.

“I don’t believe in hell.”

“You have to. It’s the only way some people ever get what they deserve.”