Page 11

CHAPTER 10

August 12 th

4:55 PM

A S EMOT IONALLY UNPREPARED as 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 fillers when 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?”

“I want them to like me.”

“One dinner won’t make them like you.”

I pretend to be engrossed in selecting an eyeshadow to hide how deep the words cut. One dinner won’t make them like me, but sometimes loyalty demands self-sacrifice. My sisters need to know I haven’t forgotten what it means to be Tom Byrd’s daughter. They need to know I’m one of them too, not the turncoat they’ve imagined. Their horrors are my horrors.

I dip my brush into the beige powder and dust it into the crease of my eyelid. “I know that,” I say after a moment.

“Family is overrated anyway.”

“At least you have them. At least if you died, you’d have more than just the priest show up at your funeral.”

Sara laughs, and I smile along with her, even though it wasn’t a joke. “I can think of three people who might show,” she says. “Me, that Kiera girl you’re always gushing about, and whoever you ran off to meet this morning.”

“Gil Crawford? He needs an act of God to make it to Christmas.”

“The guy who brought you the books, right? What’s wrong with him?”

“Alzheimer’s,” I say.

“My kunsi had it. It’s like watching someone die in slow motion.” She shares a dolorous look with the dog, who mauls a rawhide bone dangerously close to my pillow. Ropes of slobber dangle from her jaws.

“No one deserves to get Alzheimer’s, of course, but Gil … he’s the only adult in my life who ever really loved me. It’s not fair for it to be him instead of my father, or Josiah Eastman, someone like that.” The shift in Sara’s mood is subtle enough to slip past the untrained eye, but after hundreds of hours locked in the same prison cell, I have her emotional tells memorized. “If you have something to say, go ahead and say it.”

“Gil knew about your dad.”

“Everyone did, Sara. It wasn’t a secret that my sisters and I were mistreated.” Immediately I regret using the word mistreated , but the euphemisms make it easier to talk about. I can either minimize my suffering, or I can never talk about it at all.

“It’s nice he fed you dinner and helped you with homework and bought you presents at Christmas, but he’s no hero. He still let you go home every day.”

“He did what he could.”

“He knew you were being abused.” Sara lowers herself onto the air mattress beside me. It seems like a gesture from an older sister, the type of bonding moment I could have shared with Harmony or Grace if my life had taken a different turn. “I know you love him, but he could have done more for you.”

“I could say the same about a lot of people.”

We ease into silence. Sara rests her head in the curve between my neck and my collarbone, her hand clasping mine. I have spent years starved for simple affection like this. My friends back home will send me a text to make sure I’ve gotten home safe after a night out and bring me groceries while I recover from surgery, but I’ve never been able to melt fully into their arms the way I can with Sara. She sees me. She knows me. She loves me.

“It’s not your fault,” Sara says. “None of it is.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure you do. I just don’t think you’ve ever heard someone else say it.”

I don’t recognize the house when I step inside. It’s like looking through a funhouse mirror and trusting that, improbable as it may seem, this is the same place I spent the first seventeen years of my life.

The only familiar thing is the treacly scent wafting from the kitchen. Grace is baking chokecherry pie, the recipe passed to her from our mother, to our mother from our grandmother, and so on up the maternal line. I never learned the recipe myself. Like our mother, Grace turns the kitchen into a war zone as she cooks, utensils strewn across the black laminated countertop and soiled dishes wedged into the sink like Tetris blocks, cabinet doors left open in her wake. A peek into the refrigerator confirms my fear I will have to suffer through tuna noodle casserole for dinner.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, sweeping the toast crumbs from the counter into the sink. I need to feel useful. Anything to distract myself from the knot in my stomach, tighter than a noose. Outside the window above the sink, the rusty windchimes tinkle. Air conditioning is a luxury not offered in the Byrd house. Unless there’s a tornado warning, every window stays open all summer long.

Grace snaps on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and bumps me out of the way with her hip. She scrubs the dishes at world record speed. Our father hates coming home to a dirty kitchen. “Harmony will be late to her own funeral. And Dad …” She glances at the microwave clock. “Liquor store is still open for another ten minutes. He’s closing early just for this.”

“Can I help?”

She drops a fork into the dishwasher with a clang. “There’s a water dish for the cat out by the shed. It probably needs to be refilled.”

“He lets you have a cat?”

“Just a stray I feed.”

The sharpness of her tone dismisses me. I seize the opportunity to tour the rest of the downstairs. There is a new leather sofa in the living room, right beside the lumpy, tattered recliner my father installs himself in to watch Rockies games in the summer, Broncos games in the winter, and Nuggets games in the spring. Above all else, the living room is a shrine to his hometown teams. The sole Rockies pennant hangs above the entertainment center, flanked by metal signs shaped like home plate and emblazoned with the team logo. Elsewhere there are bobbleheads, throw blankets, photographs of Coors Field, baseball and basketball jerseys, and even a coat hanger personalized with my father’s name and Broncos insignia. The only decoration in the room unrelated to sports is the small urn of his mother’s ashes on the mantle. Byrd men are buried in the family plot; Byrd women are cremated and left to gather dust. There’s a beer on the end table, still half full. I move it off the coaster to spite him.

I hold my breath through the cloud of mildew in the laundry room and don’t breathe again until I’m in the backyard. I find the water bowl in a sliver of shade beside the toolshed, where, my better judgment notwithstanding, I linger too long. Nestled against the fence is a stone with ANNIE painted on it in childish scrawl. It’s a memorial for my childhood dog. We couldn’t bury her, and my father was sorry for that, but he wanted me to have a place I could mourn. Make something for Annie. Make something pretty.

I hope he doesn’t shoot the cat. Please, God. If the universe is a merciful one, he will leave the cat alone.

I smoke a cigarette to calm my nerves and pulverize it beneath the heel of my shoe when I’m done. My relief is short-lived. Back in the kitchen, the scent of the chokecherry pie now mingles with tuna noodle casserole to create a smell I can only describe as ghastly. A bundle of nerves clogs my throat. Grace is still at the sink, enveloped in a plume of steam. “Did you see the cat?” she asks without looking up. “Big orange furball?”

“No sign of him, but he’ll have fresh water when he comes around.”

“Still feeding that stray?” Harmony’s voice is like a stone thrown through a window. She kicks off her grubby sandals in the entryway and traipses into the kitchen. For Grace, she gives a kiss on the cheek. For me, nothing. “What’s his name again?”

“Bucket,” Grace says sheepishly.

Harmony helps herself to a cold beer. She flicks the cap off with a steak knife. “Like something out of a cartoon.”

“I found him sleeping in a bucket. I thought it was a good name for a stray.”

“I think it’s a great name.” I pluck the beer cap off the floor and toss it into the trash can. As I sit beside Harmony at the table, the same cherrywood one Gil Crawford built for us when I was young, she unfolds the newspaper for the sole purpose of blocking me from her view. I should be irritated by how little she’s changed in the years since we last saw each other, the pitifulness of a twentysomething with the emotional maturity of a preteen, but it stokes a protective fire within me that, before now, I’d only felt toward Grace.

Grace crams the last bowl into the dishwasher. Her forehead glistens with sweat. “You can help yourself to the beers too, Providence. Dad won’t mind.”

“He always minds when it comes to beer.”

“He said it’s a special occasion.”

All three of us glance at the clock at the same time. It’s already seven. He’s locking up the liquor store right now.

“Tuna noodle casserole, right?” Harmony asks.

Grace nods and takes the empty seat between us. She crosses her legs once at the thighs, then again at the ankles, an unnatural contortion better suited to a yoga class than a dinner table. “It’s the only thing he can make,” she says. “That and scrambled eggs.”

“He always made a ham at Christmas,” I add.

Harmony scoffs but does not elaborate.

“He still makes the Christmas ham.” Grace smiles at us both, but the corners of her lips falter when she fails to break the tension. I give her my undivided attention. Let Harmony be the one to look insolent. “He bought new lights for the house last year too. Mom thought he was going to fall off the ladder and kill himself putting them up.”

“God willing,” Harmony snorts.

Grace sighs. “Harmony, stop.”

“Come on, don’t act like it wouldn’t be the best thing that ever happened to us if the old man kicked the bucket tomorrow. It’s too bad Providence tried to murder the wrong parent.”

I steer the conversation back to normalcy. “We always had good Christmases. The decorations, the ham, chokecherry pie …”

“They took Grace and I to Carey Gap to look at lights every year,” Harmony says, emphasizing Grace and I to underscore my exclusion.

“They took you and me too before Grace was born.”

She ignores me again.

“I’m surprised I didn’t see you at the search this morning,” I quip to Harmony.

“I had other business to attend to.”

“More important than finding our mother?”

She laughs too hard. “That’s rich coming from you. You don’t really give a shit if Mom comes back or not. When this is all said and done, you’ll just go back to wherever you came from and pretend none of this ever happened. You don’t have to live with the consequences of what happens here. You get to go along your merry way, and we get to clean up the wreckage. Same as it’s always been.”

Outside, the porch steps creak. Our reactions are lightning quick, like we’ve been digging through our parents’ sock drawer for spare change and need to hide the evidence before they come upstairs. Beers on coasters. Newspaper folded up. The last suds in the sink washed down the drain. Grace meets him in the entryway, beer in hand. I taught Harmony how to welcome him home. She must have taught Grace too.

Our father stalls in the doorway to soak in the scene before him, his face alight with a placid smile. I try to imagine this moment as innocent. I try to think of it as any man, finally home after a long day’s work, eager to spend an evening with his children.

“My three girls. I’ve been waiting years for this.” Youngest to oldest, Grace then Harmony then me, he plants a kiss atop our heads, a ceremony he performs with the grandeur of a priest blessing his sinners. “Gracie, open this beer for me.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

“Serve up the casserole while you’re up. I’m starving.”

Grace buzzes around the kitchen with the measured efficiency of a waitress. She divvies up the utensils alone, more like the help than part of the family. “Let me make myself useful,” I offer.

But when I stand, my father takes me by the wrist. His touch is more tender than it was this morning, and it throws me off balance.

“She can do it herself, butterfly.”

“I don’t mind—”

“All under control,” Grace chirps as she distributes the napkins. My father gets his first.

Harmony angles toward our father as he takes the head of the table—right next to me. “How did the search go?”

“Useless again. Fucking sheriff’s department couldn’t find treasure if you gave them a map with X marking the spot. I’m planning to go down there tomorrow and give Sheriff Eastman a piece of my mind. Whole thing has been a travesty so far. How hard is it to find some old man’s wife after she’s run off?” His Adam’s apple pulses grotesquely as he swills his beer. He sets the bottle down with a satisfied ahhh .

“Was work any better?” Harmony asks.

“Busy morning, slow afternoon. Accident on the road up to the reservation.”

The two-lane highway linking Annesville to Long Grass is a magnet for drunk drivers. Head-on collisions and cars coiled around utility poles routinely bottleneck traffic to one lane or shut the road down entirely. Our father regales us with the colorful account of a man who tried to shoplift a handle of whiskey by shoving it down his pants. He doesn’t pause to thank Grace when she sets his plate before him. Her shoulders deflate as she fetches the other plates. She is going above and beyond to fill the gaps left by our mother, but to our father, she is merely doing what is expected of her. He doesn’t care which woman opens his beer and dishes up his dinner. We exist to serve him.

At last, the four of us are seated at the table. The tuna noodle casserole is heaped on the center of my plate in an amorphous gray mound, its surface cratered with peas and cubed mushrooms. I’m reaching for my fork when my father takes my hand. I hunch my shoulders and squeeze my arms against myself until I am as small as I can possibly be.

“I’d like you to say grace,” my father says to me.

“I’m out of practice.” I look to Grace for help, but she is absently picking the peas out of her food and corralling them to the edge of the plate.

His crows’ feet deepen when he smiles. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “It’s like swimming. You never forget.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

“Come on now. Don’t be difficult.”

He takes Grace’s hand, and, begrudgingly, Harmony takes mine. I am surprised by the ease with which I recall the grace prayer and how steady my words are, even as my thoughts dissolve into indistinct panic. “Gracious God, we have sinned against Thee, and are unworthy of Thy mercy. Pardon our sins and bless these mercies for our use, and help us eat and drink to Thy glory for Christ’s sake. Amen.”

My father lowers my hand into my lap. He holds it a moment too long before letting go. His knuckle brushes against my thigh. Beneath the table, I rub my palm against my knee again and again, until the traces of his clammy, calloused touch are only a memory. But now his touch is other places too, the small of my back and the curve of my knee and the nape of my neck. I don’t realize how much I am sweating until a breeze rolls through the window and feels like winter against my damp skin. Every part of me is slick with sweat. I am sweating into this borrowed dress. I am sweating beneath my veneer of makeup. I am sweating behind my ears. I am sweating between my thighs.

“Providence? You’re turning gray.” Grace’s archless eyebrows lift in alarm. “I can get you a cold washcloth.”

I shake my head. “Hot, that’s all.”

My father hooks a finger beneath the sleeve of my denim jacket. There it is again. His touch, light against my inner wrist, rough like the scales of a crocodile. “It’s this goddamn jacket. You’ll get heatstroke if you don’t take this thing off.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What have you got to hide, butterfly?”

I throw myself out of my chair and fly up the stairs two at a time. The bedrooms still have no doors and the floor still creaks, creaks, creaks until the dead spot outside of my old room. I lock myself in the bathroom. Fragments of downstairs conversation float up to me and I cannot understand any of it. Suddenly they are speaking another language. I claw at the denim, try to escape from it, but it is a straitjacket. I fight for every breath. My heartbeat throbs in my ears so furiously I expect my eardrums to burst and torrents of blood to gush down my neck.

I need the release. I need it right now. I hike up the sleeve of the jacket as far as it will go, a few measly inches above my wrist, and I bite deep and I bite long, and when the salty tang of blood hits my tongue, I inhale through my teeth. I swear I can see bone when I suck the blood away, but the bite still doesn’t feel deep enough. I want to rend my flesh from my bones. I want to free myself from the body in which I am imprisoned, the body that forces me to remember even when my mind tries to forget.

I don’t know how long I have been sitting on the bathroom floor with toilet paper pressed against my wound when someone knocks. I throw the bloodied tissue away and hide the bite beneath my sleeve, as if the intruder might be able to sense it through the door if I don’t cover it up.

“Your food is getting cold and I have to pee.”

“Go use the other bathroom, Harmony.”

“I can tell you’re not on the toilet. Open up.”

I do.

She is slumped against the wall with her neck lolled to one side. Whether she’s just tipsy or already roaring drunk, I can’t tell. “I have a bone to pick with you.”

“Do I look like I’m in the mood?”

“You look like shit. You’re sweating like you’re giving birth.”

I try to slip past her, but she blocks me by extending each of her spindly limbs toward a different corner of the doorframe, a spider upon its web. “Just a girl, standing in front of another girl, asking that girl to leave Grace the fuck alone.”

“ Notting Hill ? How drunk are you?”

“I mean it, Providence.” She hisses the last syllable of my name. “Leave Grace alone.”

“She’s my sister too.”

“And you will ruin her! She thinks you are a godsend. She thinks you are the sister she’s been waiting for all these years. Me, she already knows I’m a disappointment. But you? I’ve had to listen to her talk about how oh, Providence actually seems nice and oh, Providence came to help me when I got in trouble at school . Mom is gone, you come galloping in to save the day, and when you piss off back to wherever you came from, you will leave her alone, and hurt, and miserable. We all have the same parents, but you are not her sister. I am her sister. I am the one who’s always been there, through everything. I am not perfect, but I try, God damn it. You are using her to fill some miserable void in your life, and you don’t care that it will destroy her when you leave.” She blinks back tears. Her nose crinkles and her mouth twists into a frown. “Please. I have never asked you for anything, but I’m asking you for this. It’s the least you can do for me.”

She’s right. About all of it. There are the two of them, connected in ways I scarcely understand, and then there is me. I yearn for sisterhood; they already have it. They don’t need me. The same crush of loneliness I felt when Sara embraced me descends upon me once again. However the search for my mother ends, if it ever ends, I will eventually leave Annesville and I will have the luxury of trying to forget. For Harmony and Grace, their lives will steep in this calamity for years to come.

I dig my fingernails into my palms, channeling my anger into my skin instead of my voice. The only advantage I have in an argument with Harmony is my ability to stay calm. She’ll have me on the back foot if I get emotional. “If Grace wants me to leave her alone, fine. If she asks, I’ll do it. No questions asked. She has a right to keep me out of her life. But I’m not doing it for you.”

Harmony feigns interest in the notches hewn into the doorframe, where our mother measured us on every birthday. Most birthdays, anyway. We each have a few years missing. It was a maternal ritual she undertook only when she was sober. As Harmony’s arms fall to her sides, I catch sight of the engagement ring on her left hand. “You don’t have one decent bone in your body. You’re rotten right to your core,” she says. “You’re a killer. Least get the right parent this time. Do us all a fucking favor.”

“If you want him to die that much, do it yourself.”

“I have Grace to think about. Who do you have?”

Through dinner, the bite mark throbs. I slide my fingers along the avulsion and trace the shape of each individual tooth. By now I know exactly what shape each one makes, how the canines on my left side differentiate from the right and how perfectly spaced the dental work has made my front teeth. I return to the bite mark every time my father speaks; I bit myself exactly where he touched me.

My father allows me to help Grace with the dishes. He is three beers deep by the time he and Harmony retreat to the living room for the Rockies game, and I can tell by his bearish growl they are losing. He then says something else to make Harmony laugh.

When he excused himself for the game, she hopped up, grabbed two cold beers, and volunteered to join him. Peering over my shoulder, I see she’s not even sitting at the farthest edge of the couch, cowering away from his recliner like I would be. The only thing between them is the end table on which both of their beers rest. Harmony’s legs drape over the arm of the couch. She is within fatherly range. This is her defense mechanism: while Grace and I would move heaven and earth to stay away from him, she wins his favor by pretending to like him. If she doesn’t put up a fight, she’s not a tantalizing target. He likes it when we fight back.

“I should have played softball.” The running water overpowers Grace’s voice. The chokecherry pie, burnt on the top, cools on a wire rack beside us.

“For him?”

“It disappointed him when I wasn’t interested in it.”

“It wouldn’t change anything. He’d still be …” I trail off.

“He’d like me more.”

I let the words hang. I’m about to change the subject when I think of what Sara said earlier. I know you loved him, but he could have done more for you. “Is he nice to you?” The euphemism is worse than not asking at all, but the words wilt on my tongue when I try to be more direct.

“Yeah.”

“You can tell me the truth.”

She hands me a plate to load into the dishwasher. “Why would I lie about that?”

“I’m not saying—”

“Why can’t we talk about something normal? Like, why can’t you ask me about school, or about my friends, or if I have a boyfriend? I want to be normal for, like, five minutes. I don’t want to talk about this serious shit.”

“Don’t say shit .”

“I’m almost eighteen,” Grace says. “You can stop treating me like a kid.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

It earns me a smile. The more I see the gap between her front teeth, the more it charms me.

We don’t speak again until Grace starts cutting the pie. “Do you ever … like, you’ll just be doing something normal, like folding laundry, and you start thinking about it? Things he’s done? And you can’t get it out of your head? It gets stuck there and I—I want to reach inside my skull and take out my brain so it stops.”

“For me it’s usually nightmares.”

“All the time?” she asks.

“Not always. I have a lot of sleeping problems.”

“Like what?”

“Someone so much as takes the first step up to my apartment and I’m wide awake. I sleep with a white noise machine to drown sounds out.”

“What’s your apartment like?” The dreamy look in her eyes tells me she isn’t asking to be polite, but to open a portal to a world outside Annesville. Grace’s universe is a tragically small one, existing almost entirely within the saltbox house on Cedar Street and under our father’s watchful eye.

“It’s small, just one bedroom, but it’s cozy. I filled it with plants so it would be bright and cheery—peace lilies, mostly. They’re my favorite. It has a fireplace too, but it doesn’t work, so I bought lots of candles to stick in there instead. But my favorite thing is the view from my bedroom. If I look hard enough, I can see the Missouri River, just barely.”

Her smile is small and sad. “I want to see a big river like that, not just the dribbling little creeks around here.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to show you someday.”

I envision it with painful clarity. As summer steals into fall and the trees turn the color of marmalade, we’ll drive out to the limestone bluffs halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis and have a picnic lunch on the banks of the river. I’ll bring a bottle of champagne for us to share because that seems like something a big sister should do, sneak her little sister her first sips of alcohol. Maybe we’ll talk, or maybe we’ll just pass the hours in blissful, easy silence, swathed in the warmth of each other’s company.

“Where would I sleep if there’s only one bedroom?”

“You’d take the bedroom and I’d sleep on the couch.” I look toward the stairs. My throat tightens. “It has a door, Grace.”

Grace shoos a moth away from the pie, but says nothing. In the living room, the television screen bathes Harmony and my father in harsh white light, the two of them engaged in seemingly lighthearted conversation. The camaraderie is a betrayal.

“What about Harmony? I bet she’d let you stay with her.”

Grace shakes her head furiously, like a swimmer trying to get water out of her ears. “I don’t want to live with Harmony.”

“Did she do something to you, Grace?”

“No, just … everything with Mom and Dad. She refuses to talk about it. I’m not even sure she talks about it in therapy.”

“At least she goes.”

“It doesn’t do her any good. If you’re going to therapy and you still try to kill yourself, what’s the point?” She clenches her eyes to wish away her last words. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t my secret to tell.”

“Mum’s the word.”

Grace hands me the plate with the largest slice of pie, clearly intended for our father, in a gesture of gratitude. From the living room, he bellows, “Come on, girls. Come be part of the family.”

It is there, in the living room—forks chiming against plates, baseball announcers prattling on about ERA and WHIP, my father chewing pie with his mouth open—that I really notice my mother’s absence. When I close my eyes, I picture her curled up in the rocking chair with her favorite shawl wound around her shoulders, a specterlike presence too drunk or too sad to make conversation. But she was always there.

“If I’d had sons,” my father says through a belch, “they’d be out there on Coors Field right now. I’d have raised three Tulowitzkis all by myself.”

“Three shortstops on the same team?” Grace asks.

He points at me with his beer. “We thought Providence was going to be a boy. She would have been Thomas Byrd Jr.” He mutes the television as a commercial comes on. “I still remember when the doctor handed you to me and I saw the pink blanket. I thought they’d made a mistake.”

“My mot—Mom had an ultrasound. You knew I was going to be a girl.”

He shakes his head. “No, butterfly. I think you’re remembering wrong.”

I am not. My mother showed me the ultrasound when I was a teenager, with the words baby #1 is a girl! jotted along the top of the picture. I chew on a bite of pie until it liquefies and trickles down my throat like sludge. Even when my mouth is empty, I keep chewing. I can’t stop moving. If I’m not chewing, I am tapping a foot. If I’m not tapping a foot, I am quivering. I’m fighting against primal instincts. My brain triggers the fight-or-flight response over and over again, and the longer I remain planted on this couch, the more unbearable the adrenaline becomes.

He laughs to himself, like he’s come up with a brilliant punchline for a joke he has wanted to tell all evening. “But listen, I’ve got to ask … Grace, Harmony, what do we all think about the fake tits?”

“Dad!” Grace chokes on her pie. “Don’t say that.”

“Sorry, sorry. Just—it’s the elephant in the room, you know?”

Harmony can’t help herself. “Elephants, plural.”

“How’d you get the money for those, butterfly?”

My gaze falls to my chest. I see them for the first time the way other people do, as silicone cries for attention, instead of the first and only way I have ever been able to dictate the terms of my own sexuality. “None of your business.”

“Guessing you didn’t marry a rich man.”

“No.”

“Ah, nothing wrong with that. Your mom didn’t marry me because I was the richest man in Annesville, that’s for damn sure.” She married him because she was sixteen and pregnant with me. He only proposed because he was twenty-seven and thought, erroneously, he was staring down a statutory rape charge if they didn’t tie the knot. He told the story to prove my mother was a slut. Sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be so easy, after all.

“Do you miss her?” Harmony asks.

“I miss her like hell,” he says, “but I know she’ll walk through that door any minute now. I’ll never get rid of her. Like a bad penny.”

“Someone must have kidnapped her.”

“Harmony, stop,” Grace pleads.

“Use your brain, Grace.” Harmony taps an index finger against her temple. “You’re always talking about those stupid podcasts you listen to. You can’t tell me you think she’s enjoying a vacation in Yellowstone.”

“I know nothing good happened to her, okay? I don’t like thinking about Mom being kidnapped. It makes me sick.”

“All I’m saying is someone probably took her, tied her up—”

“Enough!” Our father clouts the side of his recliner. “Quit it. You’re scaring her. That’s enough from all of you.”

“It’s not that I’m, like, na ? ve about it.” Grace looks at her plate while she talks. The last shard of crust crumbles when she stabs it with her fork. “I try to have a little hope is all.”

“Hope is dangerous,” Harmony says. “You give someone a shred of hope and they cling to it for the rest of their life.”

I cringe at my father’s roar before I even hear it. We violated his cardinal rule: when he asks for something, he only asks once. “Not another goddamn word about your mother. Not one more goddamn word.”

The game is back on. He dials up the volume loud enough to catch the attention of a passing jet airplane. Only Harmony is unaffected by his pivot from jovial to cross. She stretches languorously across the couch and shakes her beer to coax out the dregs. I notice the severe dip from her ribcage to her stomach, how her hipbones strain against her skin. I examine her for scars, but Harmony doesn’t even have moles or birthmarks, never mind mutilation as extreme as my own. No trace of how she tried to end her life. I want to ask her the same questions Grace asked me. What is it like for her? Is she haunted too?

“I’m going outside for a cigarette,” I say when the Rockies pull their starting pitcher. The manager, a toad of a man, waddles out to the mound with his hands stacked on his hips.

“Grab me another beer while you’re up.”

I get in the car and floor it.