“Did you want to tell me something?” I said.
She nodded. She was looking down at her hands. She wore numerous rings, eight at least, cheap flea market silver with grimy birthstones from months she wasn’t born in, the bands gone tight beneath her swollen knuckles. This was why Ruby said you should never wear a ring long enough to grow old with it—some people shriveled and some people swelled, and you couldn’t be sure which way your body would go.
“She told me not to see you,” my mom confessed. “She said no visits. Not to call. Said she’d let me know when—” She looked up, and there was a flicker of fright in her watery eyes, and then she stopped talking.
I didn’t believe her excuses. The idea of my mom wanting to see me all this time, all while living in the same town, was absurd.
“Ruby didn’t tell you not to see me,” I said. “She would’ve said something.”
The expression on her face made me think she was more sober than she let on, that if I said the right thing, asked the right question, she’d know exactly how to respond.
“There was something not right with her from the beginning,” she said. “A mother knows when her child’s not right, she can sense it.”
She must have been remembering a different Ruby, not the one I knew. Whatever she saw in my sister wasn’t what I could see. And wouldn’t want to.
“What do you even mean by that?” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with Ruby.”
“She has a way about her, ever notice that? Always did, since she was small. A way of getting you to do things for her. To get what she wants. Say what she wants you to say.”
I shrugged. This was true, but what of it?
“You couldn’t stop her. You couldn’t stop her if you tried.”
I glanced up at Pete, wanting to mouth Help! and have him rescue me, but his attention was too caught up in his beer.
“I should’ve been there for you, Chloe,” my mom was saying. “To leave you alone like that with her. I’m so sorry.”
She’d said things like this to me before, about being sorry, about leaving me alone, always after she’d sobered up and had her meetings. It didn’t matter what I said back. I could hum with thumbs in my ears, or use an onion to cry. It was all so temporary. Only the things Ruby said to me could be counted on forever.
Still, I realized in this moment that I wasn’t mad at her. Maybe another girl would be, to have this kind of mother, but what Sparrow didn’t know is that I didn’t need a mom, not when I had Ruby. My heart was already full.
“How drunk are you?” I asked. “Will you even remember this tomorrow? That we talked?”
“I remember everything,” she said. She enunciated very carefully, as if she wanted to make sure it sunk in. “Everything , Chloe. Every single thing.”
The dark of the room felt dimmer as she said that. Here, I felt sure, this here was what she wanted to communicate to me. It wasn’t about regret or love or how bossy Ruby was—it was this. She saw what I could see, and she wanted me to know that.
Out of everyone in town—even London—she was the only one who did.
“Do you remember . . .” I started, expecting at any moment for a text from Ruby to come through to keep me from talking, expecting someone to ask for my ID, expecting Pete to run out of beer, expecting a blockade that didn’t come, “do you remember sending that box to me in Pennsylvania, when I first moved in with Dad?”
She nodded gravely.
“The feathers made a big mess on the floor,” I said.
She waited. She knew what I was going to say next.
“And the obituary,” I said. “From that newspaper across the river. Do you remember sending that?”