Page 12 of We Already Dug the Grave

Later that evening I was bussing tables, practically humming, when I overheard some high school girls talking loudly with their parents about an upcoming tristate mathlete competition, nervous because they were up against a gifted school from Chattanooga, Tennessee, that was supposedly unbeatable. There’s this ringer, some genius girl, they’d said. My ears had perked up, but I hadn’t realized they were talking about Frances—my Frances—until later, because that would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?

It kept happening. The internal door would barely crack. My leaves would whisper sister. News of Frances would cross my path.

A random newspaper left in a corner booth featuring a story about Frances’s team taking second place in that same competition.

Years later, an Auburn sorority stopping into the diner on their way to spring break in Destin, listing the freshmen who couldn’t come.

More time passing and a social media post circulating about a girl missing from her college dorm. Frances’s butter-yellow hair in the background of the photo of the campus-wide candlelight vigil. And with each sighting I learned a little more.

Frances had it all.

Sorority. Career. Marriage. A whole life that, once upon a time, I’d dreamed of for the both of us. Now, out of reach for me except as a voyeur, when I dared peek into my teacup, or sometimes, my sister’s Instagram.

It felt like a punishment. One that perhaps I deserved.

My body buzzed with nervous energy. How would she appear this time? I didn’t have to wonder for long. The local news played on the television, and when the camera cut away from the newsroom, I got my answer.

Sometimes fate was like that. So quick. So insistent.

Frances. Sister.

My breath caught in my chest.

I rose, stepping over the coffee table, pausing a foot from the television screen.

There was Frances, with her blond hair rippling around her shoulders like a sheet of banana taffy, wearing an expensive floral dress and heels, right at home next to her suit-clad husband. Her smile and posture were poised, perfect, but to me they rang hollow.

The camera panned across the steps of a large building identified by the running script near the bottom of the screen as the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. A crowd watched as a plump, red-faced man accepted an award.

“Earlier today, former Alabama governor Walsh ‘Washy’ Anderson accepted the Douglas Roberts Humanitarian Award for his work with foster youth.”

As a reporter spoke, my eyes never strayed from my sister.

“The former governor and First Lady of Alabama and their two sons and adult grand-kids gathered on the steps of the capitol building for the ceremony. What a good-looking family. Don’t you agree, Joe?”

And it was true: They were a good-looking family, dressed in designer suits and dresses, not a highlighted hair out of place, with rows of bleached smiles. Expensive. Southern. Preppy.

Frances was tucked close to her husband, as if she were made for this. As if she hadn’t been raised, same as me, feral and barefoot down a driveway hung with bones, by women who sold poison and dealt in divination. As if our mama wasn’t still in jail for shooting our daddy.

No article I’d ever read about my sister and her well-to-do in-laws had ever brought that up. Not even the spread in Southern Living. The Andersons were the Alabama Kennedys, and I guess for them, everything was for sale, even the correct pedigree.

The reporter droned on, and I stared at the screen, transfixed.

Frances’s fingers twitched.

Suddenly, I jolted, my mouth dry as sand. The hand signal was gentle and small, created to go unnoticed by anyone who wasn’t us. It was meant to deal with middle school bullies and prying Puddle Creek busybodies. A secret SOS, our sign for help. Back when she trusted me to keep her safe.

I knelt, leaned forward, my nose almost touching the television screen. Frances’s fingers were still and straight. Her hand gently pressed to her side.

Had I imagined it?

I squinted, shoulders seized to my ears, breath held. Waiting.

Waiting waiting waiting.

There. Her fingers made the upside-down peace sign, curling in and out, in and out, as if she were scratching her upper thigh.

Not my imagination.