Page 76 of The Sister's Curse

My heart lurched into my mouth. I could just keep driving, avoid her, pretend she didn’t recognize me. I’d avoided conflict with her my whole life. Why would now be any different?

But I pulled over to the curb, shut off the engine, and rolled down the window. I listened to the radiator tick and a catbird scream a warning from the crab apple tree in the front yard.

She crossed the street to the car, her arms folded, holding thecigarette close to her chin. She stopped and looked down at me with that cold expression I remembered.

We stared at each other. I waited for her to speak first.

“I thought I’d seen the last of you.” She flicked ash away. That was the woman I remembered from most of my childhood—cold and calculating. Not the woman from my dreams, who really saw me. My dreams felt distant now, like yearnings conjured by my sleeping mind, not the woman she really was.

I lifted my shoulder. “I’m like a bad penny that way.”

She exhaled smoke. “Why are you here?”

I wasn’t going to say it out loud. “I was just in the neighborhood. Got curious.”

She looked down at me, the way she did when I was small. “I’m sorry, but I’m all out of cake. You understand.”

My mouth turned up. I didn’t remember her ever baking a cake for me. “Enjoy your cake. Maybe some other time.”

I cranked the ignition, and she stepped back. I pulled away from the curb slowly, and she returned to the house.

I waited until I got out on the main drag to start trembling, the way I’d wanted to when she approached the car.

Stalemate. We understood each other. We each knew what the other truly was: monstrous.

And neither of us could rat out the other without revealing her own monstrosity.

Wholesome family-picture stuff.

I chewed on it the whole way home. I shouldn’t have gone there. Regret surged in the back of my throat. If my mother dropped the dime on me, my life would be over. There was nothing to be gained from poking that bear.

It didn’t matter if she was a monster to her daughter and grandchildren. What mattered was that she was a monster to me. Therewas no reconciling this. I, better than anyone else, should’ve known that people were different people in different situations. They were chameleons. I could spend years trying to unravel my mother’s psyche, but I would likely unravel only my own life.

Poison was poison, and I had to learn not to touch it.

18

Cursed

I led a charmed life.

My SUV blew a head gasket on the way back, just after sunset.

I was going seventy miles an hour when the engine started to overheat. When white smoke started rolling out from the exhaust pipe, I lost power immediately.

I let off the accelerator and coasted to a stop on the side of the road as the engine hissed. I shouldn’t have trusted Lister’s dealership to work on my car. My car had a hundred and fifty thousand miles on her, but she’d never left me in the lurch.

I popped the hood and looked down at the aftermath with the flashlight on my cell phone. My radiator fluid reservoir was dry. I poked around and pulled the oil dipstick, which came back milky with what I presumed was radiator fluid mixed in. Fuck. I wasn’t a car-repair gal—I knew only enough to get by—but this looked expensive as fuck. Still, I was lucky that it had happened in an area with no traffic, and that nobody had gotten hurt.

I stared at my phone. There was one bar here, and that wasenough to call for a tow. I opened my door and sat in the driver’s seat to wait, feeling the heat shimmering up from the pavement and smelling burning oil and radiator fluid as the engine cooked. It would be hard to prove Lister’s guys had fucked up my car; it wasn’t like my car had just rolled off the showroom floor. But I was sure as fuck gonna try.

I scanned the highway, seeing nothing except hayfields and distant woods drenched in twilight. This was a pretty peaceful place to break down, as far as places to break down went.

Car headlights swept down the road, slowed, then pulled in behind me. Its windows were tinted, and no front license plate was required in my state. I watched in the rearview mirror as the car just sat there, engine on. I couldn’t see anything else.

My hand slid down for my sidearm. I didn’t like how this was going. I felt as vulnerable as any woman with a breakdown in the middle of nowhere. The driver of the car would be able to see through the headlights that there was only one person in the car before them, and see my ponytail. I closed my door and locked it.

Was this a run-of-the-mill opportunist? Or were the Kings of Warsaw Creek following me?