Page 39 of This is Why We Lied

Mercy had heard it, too. She glanced back at her mother, then told her son, “Jon, I’m—”

“Why do you ruin everything?” He grabbed her arms, shaking her so hard that one of the glasses slipped from her hand and shattered onto the stone floor. “Why do you gotta be such a bitch all the time?”

“Hey.” Will had stood up when Jon had grabbed his mother. He walked over, telling the boy. “Let’s go outside.”

Jon spun around, screaming, “Fuck off, Trashcan!”

Will looked stunned. Sara felt the same. How did this kid know about the terrible name? And why was he screaming it now?

“I said fuck off!” Jon tried to shove him away, but Will didn’t move. Jon tried again. “Fuck!”

“Jon.” Mercy’s hand was trembling so hard that the water sloshed in the remaining glass. “I love you, and I’m—”

“I hate you,” Jon said, and the fact that he hadn’t yelled the words felt far more devastating than his previous outbursts. “I wish you were fucking dead.”

He walked out, slamming the door behind him. The sound was like a sonic boom. No one spoke. No one moved. Mercy was frozen.

Then Cecil said, “Look at what you did, Mercy.”

Mercy bit her lip. She looked so stricken that Sara felt a sympathetic flush in her own face.

Bitty tsked her tongue. “Mercy, for godsakes, clean up that glass before you hurt anybody else.”

Will knelt down before Mercy did. He took the handkerchief out of his back pocket and used it to hold broken shards from the water glass. Mercy shakily knelt alongside him. The scar on her face practically glowed with humiliation. The room was so quiet that Sara could hear the pieces of broken glass clicking together.

“I’m so sorry,” Mercy told Will.

He said, “Don’t worry. I break things all the time.”

Mercy’s laugh was cut off by a gulp.

“I say.” Chuck put on a funny voice. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the ye olde tree.”

Christopher said nothing. He reached for another breadstick. He took a noisy bite. Sara could not imagine the rage she would feel if someone said anything even remotely bad about her little sister, but the man just chewed like a useless fool.

In fact, they were all staring at Mercy as if she were inside a tent at an old carnival freak show.

Sara addressed the table. “We should probably eat this delicious food before it gets cold.”

“That’s a good idea.” Frank was likely used to ignoring drunken outbursts. He added, “I was just reminding Monica of a trip we took to Puerto Rico a few years back. They have a type of salsa that’s different from the Brazilian samba.”

Sara played along, “In what way?”

“Shit,” Mercy hissed. She had cut open her thumb on the glass. Blood dripped onto the floor. Even from a distance, Sara could tell the wound was deep.

Sara automatically stood up to help, asking, “Is there a first aid kit in the kitchen?”

“I’m fine, I—” Mercy’s uninjured hand covered her mouth. She was going to be sick.

Cecil muttered, “For chrissake.”

Sara wrapped her cloth napkin tightly around Mercy’s thumb to help stop the bleeding. She left the rest of the broken glass to Will and guided Mercy into the kitchen.

One of the young waiters looked up, then quickly returned to preparing the plates. The other was intently loading the Hobart. The chef was the only one who seemed to care about Mercy. He looked up from the stove, his eyes tracking her across the room. His brow was furrowed in concern, but he stayed silent.

“I’m okay,” Mercy told him. Then she nodded to Sara. “It’s back here.”

Sara followed her toward a bathroom that looked like it served as a pass-through to a cramped office. There was an electric typewriter on the metal desk. Papers were stacked all over the floor. There was no telephone. The only nod to modernity was a closed laptop sitting on top of a stack of accounting ledgers.