“And yet you get engaged to someone and never once hint about it to your own flesh and blood.”
“Would you also like to invoke the pinkie promise I made to you when I was eight?” I ask, gesturing with my beer bottle. “Or maybe the time I got you high when I was twenty and we made a blood pact by pricking our fingers with safety pins and dabbing it on the back of a gas station receipt? Or perhaps the time you told me that—”
Elizabeth bursts out laughing. She laughs so hard she snorts. Satisfied, I take another long pull from my beer.
“I forgot about that,” she says, sighing. “What was our blood pact about?”
“Sisterhood, I think.”
“That’s it?”
“We were really high.”
“That remains the first and last time I’ve done drugs, you know,” she says, leaning her head back against my couch, her curls squashing against the fabric. We’ve got exactly the same hair, but somehow hers is always neat and orderly and mine is…
…not.
“You mean you’re not up all night doing eight balls?” I ask.
“I can tell you’re kidding but I don’t even know what that is,” Elizabeth says. “Other than it’s some kind of drug thing.”
“Cocaine.”
“Yikes.”
“Yup.”
I tried cocaine exactly once, when I was nineteen, dumb, and hanging out with a rough crowd. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t walk because the bottoms of my feet were bruised and cut to shit. Apparently, I’d insisted on running several miles home, barefoot. I never tried it again.
There’s a long pause.
“You were about to tell me what’s going on with Daniel,” she prompts.
“Was I?” I ask.
“You were,” she says.
For a second, I wonder if all big sisters are this bossy, or if it’s just mine.
“I know something’s up,” she finally says, tucking one foot under her. “And if the next words out of your mouth are ‘Daniel and I are engaged’ you can just get right the fuck out of here because I’m not going to believe you.”
“It’s my apartment,” I point out.
“Then don’t lie to me,” she says.
I hold my breath and stare at her for a long moment. I have no idea what to do. I was all set to make up some other version of the truth, one where the rumor was wrong and something that Daniel said in court got twisted.
But I’m having a hard time getting that version out of my mouth, mostly because I know she won’t believe me for a second.
“Charles,” she says, her eyes still holding mine.
I let the breath out in a rush.
“Daniel had a hearing today, and it was supposed to be about visitation but then Crystal made it about custody, and also she’s married and pregnant and respectable now and the judge they got always sides with mothers, and so apparently Daniel panicked and told them we’re engaged so he’d seem more respectable,” I say.
“Oh, shit,” she murmurs.
“And at first, he thought that if I just put on a ring and came to the next hearing and we, like, held hands or something it would be fine, because he only told the people in the courtroom, right?” I go on, rubbing my knuckles against my forehead. “Which would have been fine, honestly, I don’t want him to lose custody either. Except of course nothing in this stupid town stays secret for even two seconds, and the next thing I knew Mom called me, shouting about Mavis Bresley.”
Elizabeth considers this seriously, looking into her beer bottle.
“Did that make sense?” I ask.
“So now, if you tell people you’re not engaged, it’ll come out that Daniel lied to a judge in a custody hearing,” she says.
“A judge who apparently has a long history of siding with mothers over fathers,” I say. “The fuck do I do, Betsy? Besides kill Daniel for putting me in this position, though that would also mean that Crystal gets custody of Rusty so that would render the whole point moot.”
She stares at the blank space of my TV for a long moment. Too long, absentmindedly clinking her wedding ring against the glass beer bottle.
“I mean, he’s had full custody for years, and Rusty was taken away from Crystal by CPS, and she’s doing so well with Daniel that even if it did come out that he lied, it wouldn’t matter, right?” I say.
She’s still frowning, clinking, staring.
“Earth to Betsy.”
“I had this student a couple of years ago,” she says. “The sweetest little boy you could imagine. He was kind of quiet, but he was really smart, got along well with all his classmates, very polite. Just a great kid. At the first back-to-school night I find out that he’s being raised by his grandparents, this absolutely lovely older couple, and as I get to know him a little better, I learn that his parents were meth heads who’d neglected him until he wound up in the hospital.”