“Dishes!” Carver pointed at me, sticking his head back into the kitchen. “You lost!”
“I did not!” I argued.
“You cheated and you still lost! Mom, stop doing the dishes—”
“I got them,” Alice interjected, shouldering past Carver.
“But, Alice—”
“Chill. I don’t mind. You look tired,” my sister added to me, taking the sponge from Mom. “You should probably get some sleep. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hesitated. “But I can do them . . .”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, we can do it together. Mom, I think Carver wants to go set that wooden cage out to see if he can trap those damn birds, and Nicki’s scared shitless of them—”
From the other room, Nicki cried, “I am not!” Then, after a moment, he added, “But they are terrifying!”
Alice gave Mom a look. “Can you help him so he doesn’t hurt himself?”
Mom sighed. “If I must . . .”
“I don’t need help!” Carver argued, but Mom took him by the shoulder and guided him out the back door.
Alice and I did the dishes in silence. Ben had left the kitchen, but I didn’t know where he’d gone instead. Hopefully to oversee my ridiculous brother, because I had very little faith that Mom would do anything other than nod sagely without really knowing what to do.
I kept wanting to say something to Alice—this was the first time we’d really been alone together, not counting Dad’s corpse in the mortuary—but nothing sounded right in my head. I used to be so good at talking to Alice. We were best friends, with all the inside jokes of sisters who actually got along.
And then we weren’t. I didn’t really think about how leaving Mairmont would hurt everyone I loved, but especially Alice, and I couldn’t get our last fight out of my head. Well, the last few fights.
“I’m sorry,” I began, “that I never came back.”
She almost dropped one of Grammy Day’s favorite dishes. “Oh my god, warn me before you do that.”
“I just apologized!”
“Yeah—I know. Gross.”
“Fine,” I said, a little hurt because honestly, I meant it, and took the plate from her and dried it furiously. “I won’t do it again.”
“Please don’t,” she agreed, scrubbing another plate angrily. Then she sighed, and her shoulders unwound. “You’re apologizing for the wrong thing, anyway. I don’t really blame you for leaving.”
I blinked. “You don’t?”
“I’m not a monster. Leaving was the only thing you really could do. And I don’t really blame you for not coming to visit, even though I said I did. Dad never asked you to come home. He never asked if we were okay with going to visit you. We just did.” She sighed and shook her head. “I just . . . for a long time I was just so mad you didn’t take me with you. Do you know how many fights I got into over you?”
I actually had to think about that one. “Thirteen?”
“Fourteen! I got into one after you left. You know Mark Erie?”
“The football guy Heather married?”
“Bingo. Cracked his jaw. Had to sip out of a straw for a month,” she replied triumphantly. And then she sighed and took a sip of her drink. “And, I guess, after a while I started just being mad at you. Because even though you were gone, you were just as tight with Dad as you always were. I was jealous of that. Of you and Dad and y’all’s ghosts.”