Page 30 of Morally Black Betrothal

I screwed the lid back on the mask so it wouldn’t dry out. “You don’t think you should be taking care of her instead of getting high in my bathtub?”

“Oh, she’s fine. That kid could survive for a week on her own. It’s like, she’s a ten, but she makes me wake up with her every day at 5:30. What else am I supposed to do on four hours of sleep?”

“Maybe get her breakfast that isn’t dessert. Or go to sleep at a normal hour instead of binging Netflix or whatever else you were doing until 1:30 in the morning.” I put the remains of the bubble bath back in my medicine cabinet and tried not to slam the door. “Try to match your schedule to hers.”

“That would mean going to bed at seven. What am I, a grandma?”

I sighed. While I knew there was no point in arguing with my sister, since basic logic had never seemed to apply to her, old habits die hard. Selena would never stop being Selena. And I would never stop trying to help her be a better person.

I took a seat on the closed toilet. “Well, I’m home. We can talk more now about your…situation.”

“Oh my God,now?” Selena gestured around, causing the smoke to waft my way again.

I blew it out of my face. At this rate, I was going to have a secondhand high. “Yeah, now. We might as well talk while Kylie is occupied.”

“Oh, come on, don’t make me review my failures when I’m so blissed out. I’ll be out in a few minutes, I promise. I just need to relax. I’ve been so stressed, Simmy. You don’t even know.”

Her head bobbed to the beats of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I couldn’t help thinking it was fitting. And wondering whether Selena would ever grow up.

Still, I knew better than to argue with her when she was like this. Or to push her to do something she didn’t want.

“Ten minutes,” I told her, standing up.

“Uh-huh, sure. You got it.”

I closed the door silently, but the rage and bitterness that filled my thoughts was loud.

Selena and I weren’t like the twins portrayed in movies and books. No one read each other’s minds. No one finished each other’s sentences. If we weren’t physically identical, I honestly would have questioned whether we were related to each other at all.

“Aunt Simone, what are you doing?”

I turned from taking a tray of proofing baskets down from the rack atop my fridge. Kylie had abandoned her cartoons and climbed up on one of the stools on the other side of the counter, chocolate smeared all the way around her mouth again.

I set the tray on top of the stove so I could wet a rag.

“Hey, peanut,” I said as I wiped her face clean once more. “Right now I’m getting ready to bake bread.”

“That’s a lot of bread,” Kylie observed as I tossed the rag toward the sink.

I nodded as I went to pull down another tray. “It’s for my pop-up.”

“What’s a pop pop?”

I smiled as I brought down the third and final tray, which I set on the counter next to the second. “It’s like a little shop stand that I set up every other week. The coffee shop on the corner lets me set one up in exchange for some of the money I earn. Kind of like a lemonade stand. You ever had one of those?”

Kylie shook her head, causing her tangled curls to dance. Poor kid. Granted, she was only four, but the reason she’d never done something so common as selling lemonade to her neighbors for a quarter wasn’t because of her age—it wasbecause her mother never stayed anywhere long enough or safe enough for her to do something so, well, childlike.

“Maybe we can set one up one day,” I said. “Your mom and I used to have one at Grandpa’s farm. We’d sell to the tourists who would come to buy cheese and Grandma’s bread.”

I turned to preheat my ovens. The oversized kitchen was one of the prime reasons I’d wanted this place. Before I’d moved in, it was a staging area for a failed catering company, and it had been relatively easy to line the oversized double ovens with bricks in order to make them more functional for baking large quantities of bread, like I did every Tuesday and Saturday morning.

“Was her bread like that?” Kylie pointed a chubby finger at the loaves sitting in their proofing baskets, lined with floured muslin.

“Yep. I learned everything I know from her. She even taught me how to make pretty designs in the loaves before they bake. Look but don’t touch, okay? This is very sharp.”

My niece watched, enthralled, as I gently upended one risen loaf onto the floured countertop, then carefully sliced into the top of the dough with a razor. I had been just as mesmerized watching my mother do this when I was Kylie’s age.

When I finished a series of calculated cuts, I turned the loaf toward her.