SWNOVELS A Deal With The Devil: Chapter 4
I like to think of myself as someone who puts family first, but when my older sister’s name appears on my phone, I consider letting it go to voice mail. Until my father’s death last summer, Liddie was my closest friend. Now, however, it feels like the impasse between us is so wide it can’t be breached, and the last thing I need after a long day at work is one of her inevitable lectures about Matt.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” she says each time we speak, because to her, Matt is family—her husband’s best friend, a fixture of our adolescence. She says it feels like something’s missing when we’re all together, minus Matt. I wonder if it’s ever occurred to her that it might feel like something’s missing for me too. That when I watch her and Alex together, playing happy family with their daughter, I’m seeing where ten years with someone was supposed to wind up.
I’ve barely said hello before she launches into her latest ovulation/pregnancy update, yet another source of irritation for me. Not that I mind her trying to get pregnant, but her single-minded obsession with it irks me. Sometimes it seems like she didn’t even mourn our father—the funeral was barely over before she was flipping through a book of baby names, as if she’d simply washed her hands of the whole thing.
“I thought I was ovulating but I did this test and it says I’m not,” she tells me. I climb onto my bed with a cup of ramen noodles. Matt thought he was being generous, letting me keep all our shitty old furniture, but I had to downsize after he left. Our king-size bed takes up so much of the room there isn’t space for anything else, and therefore serves as couch, desk, and dining room table all in one. “But you know, they say when your cervical mucus gets thick—”
“Liddie, I’m eating,” I say. “And you know how I feel about the words cervical mucus. Have you talked to Charlotte?”
Our youngest sister, now in her fourth month at a residential care facility, claims she isn’t lonely there. Liddie tends to take her at her word, for reasons I can’t begin to understand. Charlotte is the same kid who told us she was fine, again and again, before swallowing an entire bottle of aspirin.
“Not this week. I’m so busy with Kaitlin during the day, and it’s hard to catch her at night. How’s the new job?”
Because she insisted this job was a terrible idea, I’ve got no choice but to claim it’s going well, though that may be a bit of a stretch—Hayes clearly didn’t think today’s stunt was quite as funny as I did. “I’m seriously being paid four grand a week to answer phones.”
“With the mouth on you, I wouldn’t count on it lasting,” she says. “I still don’t see why you had to give Mom your entire advance.”
My eyes close tight. Liddie isn’t able to help ease my family’s financial woes in any way, but she sure doesn’t mind criticizing me for trying. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t going to be able to write the book,” I reply, the words clipped. I gave my mother the advance to pay her mortgage. If I’d known I’d wind up putting all of Charlotte’s treatment on credit cards I can’t pay off, I might have thought better of it.
“You’d still have time to finish the book if you hadn’t taken the stupid job,” she says. I hear the clink of flatware in the background. “And you wouldn’t need to if you’d just ask Matt for the money. Talk to him. He’s family.”
My teeth grind so hard she can probably hear it all the way in Minnesota. “No. He’s not.”
And even if I were poisoned and Matt was the only one with the antidote, I wouldn’t take his help. If I were drowning and he threw me a flotation device, I’d use the last of my energy to give him the finger. That half of what he said at the end appears to be true doesn’t lessen my rage. I remember the fire that burned through me after we split up—I’ll show him, I said a hundred times a day. That fire is still there, but whenever I see him in a magazine or being gossiped about online, it feels as if he’s already won.
“Let him try to fix things,” she begs.
“The things he broke can’t be fixed.” Not by him, anyway. Probably not by anyone. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him throw money at the rest of it to absolve himself of guilt.