I started jogging, and they fell away.
I got out to my car.
I navigated a parking lot whose designers should be incarcerated for creating such a maze people had to navigate, those people being folks who needed hospitals for themselves or loved ones, and as such, they were in no state to have to maneuver said maze.
And I had no idea why, because it sure wasn’t my heart or my head that made the decision, but as I drove, I ended up sitting in my car at the curb outside my sister Dream’s house.
Dream and I did not get along (marked understatement). Though, recently, there’d been a thawing. Just not much of one.
Why I was there rather than going to my mom, I did not know.
Why I was there rather than heading straight to the grocery store, buying a gallon of Tillamook Vanilla Bean ice cream and a jar of Biscoff cookie butter, emptying both into a mixing bowl, cueing up Once, and eating the whole thing, I did not know.
But there I was.
“Fuck it,” I clipped, pushed out of my Prius and trooped up to her door.
I knocked.
Dream opened the door with a baby on her hip.
The baby was not one of hers.
Seeing as she had three kids from three different men, and three jobs to take care of them, she’d managed to create a fifty-fifty custody gig with all of her baby daddies so her kids were with their dads every other week. And this was that week.
But she had a daycare thing going in her pad, taking in two other kids. So there were always kids.
After she opened the door, I noticed what I’d been noticing lately with growing alarm.
She was losing weight, and she looked beat down.
This happened when you had three jobs (her daycare, weekend waitress work at The Surf Club, where I also worked, and her Etsy store, which had taken off), three kids, and you’d used up all your family and friends (another long story), so you didn’t have a lot of help.
It was time for me to ask her about this regardless of the fact that, even if I genuinely cared about her state of being, I knew she’d be bitchy or spiteful or throw my concern in my face some other way.
I didn’t ask her about this.
I announced, “Knox was shot.”
My sister’s head jerked back.
I burst into tears on her doorstep.
For a second, I just stood there crying while she stared at me.
As expected.
We’d never been close. This deteriorated the last few years.
And I guessed now we were just…siblings.
But suddenly, I was pulled inside.
She closed the door.
She put the baby in a playpen.
She turned to me.
