2. Arianne

Ieye the clock on my kitchen wall.

The numbers are a little blurry around the edges, but I think it's seven thirty. I'm going to have to leave soon if I'm going to keep up the facade that I am indeed going to my usual Wednesday-morning shift at the diner. The scent of bacon frying is turning my stomach. Not that this is anything new. It's felt like this since a woman named Penny messaged me through social media yesterday, asking for my number if I was Mercy's sister. When we finally connected, she told me my sister, Mercy, was dead.

I had no idea what had happened to her, and Penny was painfully light on details. When I asked about my sister's life, she simply said she didn't want to get involved, but that Mercy had mentioned me from time to time. She went off the rails when we were both young. Our father kicked her out when she was fifteen, and at thirteen, I had been too scared to leave with her. That had been a decade ago.

She never contacted me again. From what Penny told me, it had taken a few days of hunting down every person with my name, Arianne Osborne, to see if they had a sister called Mercy.

As a result, the funeral is today.

"Where's my breakfast?" Patrick asks. The smell of gasoline precedes him. He must have the jacket he wears to work at the truck stop with him. My stomach makes another lurch.

"It's nearly ready." I crack three eggs into the bubbling oil as it splatters everywhere, but I've learned that Patrick likes his eggs unbearably crispy on the underside and so runny on top, they are almost raw. An impossible combination to ensure I never get them quite right.

I hear the scrape of the chair against the peeling linoleum tiles. I can guess which chair, how far it's pulled out, and exactly when I'll hear the chair being dragged back under the table.

"Where's my coffee?"

Shit.

I grab a cup and pour one quickly. Hot and strong. I leave the cooking for a moment to deliver it to him. "There you go."

He grabs my wrist, then pinches my chin so I look at him with eyes that have swollen some more since last night.

"You eating breakfast too?" he asks.

I shake my head. "Not hungry." Also, it's hard to move my jaw. It's not broken, but Patrick's fist dealt a hard blow.

He shakes his head. "You need to eat, sweetheart," he says as if he isn't looking into the bruised masterpiece he created.

"I'll grab something at the diner, later."

It's a lie because I'm about to lose my job.

"If you didn't test me so much, I wouldn't get so damn angry," he says on a sigh.

"I need to deal with the eggs before they burn."

"Don't tell me you're mad." His words are filled with disbelief.

I've done this dance with him too many times to answer honestly. "No. I just need to finish your breakfast and get going." Because I need to pretend it's business as usual so I can make the two-hour drive to Asbury Park, New Jersey.

"Glad to see you came to your senses about going to your sister's funeral. From what your dad says, she was nothing but trouble." Patrick works for my dad at the truck stop he owns and runs. Dad was on the brink of driving the business into the ground until Patrick applied for a job there. He brought enough energy to just keep it in the black.

Patrick is the son my father never had. They do everything together. Fish. Hike. They're like the same person.

My dad set us up, and he turns the other cheek when I show up bruised because of what a good worker Patrick is.

If I weren't so goddamn broke, it would be easier to leave. But there's no cash for a new place when we only just manage to make rent on this one between the two of us. I went home once. The first time it happened. But my dad let Patrick walk straight in the front door to take me back. Told me that sometimes a man loses his temper and that I should try a little harder to be good.

I hate them both, but I also don't have a lot of options. I tried reporting Patrick to the police, but his brother is an influential man involved in city politics. Thanks to a friendship with a senior cop, he was able to make my complaint disappear. I didn't have the funds to get a lawyer to help. Dad thinks I'm trouble, like my sister, and thinks I must be asking for what Patrick does to me.

My mom would never speak against my dad.

I've been saving what few cash tips I'm able to take without being noticed in a tampon box in the bathroom. We're meant to hand cash tips in to be pooled. But most people just leave their tips on their credit cards, and my boss is a tight ass who doesn't pass them on. He also plays poker with Patrick the second Tuesday every month and tells Patrick exactly how much I'm getting paid.

As a result, I have the sum total of eighty-eight bucks in the tampon box. There are also forty-two dollars in my checking account.

I let my hand slide from his without answer. Yesterday, when I heard from Penny, I made plans to go.

Patrick was clear he didn't want me to. When I told him I was leaving anyway, he reinforced the point with his fists. When I asked for time off from my server job, my boss threatened to fire me due to the number of times I'd already missed work because of the bruises my husband always left. The ultimatum was clear. Show up today, or I wouldn't have a job.

So, I made a plan. While Patrick was sleeping off his drunkenness, I grabbed the cash from the tampon box, packed a bag, and hid it in the trunk of my car.

I serve up Patrick's breakfast, then go to the bathroom and begin the process of trying to cover up the mess he made of my face. This time there is a cut, and there is no way I'm slathering concealer and foundation into it. That's a sure-fire way to get an infection. Instead, I find the most discrete Band-Aid I can find and cover it with that. Then I go to work on covering the rest of the damage.

No amount of eye cream is going to decrease the swelling, but some primer and matte foundation will make it look more like an allergic reaction than a solid beating.

Gripping the edge of the sink, I look at my face. How did my life boil down to my being so matter-of-fact in hiding how my husband treats me?

Instead of coming up with an answer, I do what I've always done. Fix up my face, style my strawberry-blonde hair so it helps hide the bruises. Distract with a bright lipstick and a heavy dose of contour to shape my cheekbones.

Gah…who am I kidding. I look exactly like what I am. A beaten wife.

The slam of the front door releases the tension in my shoulders and the knot in my stomach. The roar of his truck, the one he took out financing for in my name using my bank details, fades down the road.

By my reckoning, I have at least ten hours before he realizes I'm gone.

I don't hang around to change into my funeral outfit. I can do that on the road. But I quickly pack two more bags of clothes and grab what few sentimental things I want to keep. There is nothing of real value here for me.

When the front door shuts behind me, I realize it's more than a piece of wood. It's a symbol for closing this chapter of my life at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I get paid the day after tomorrow, and as soon as the money hits the account, I'm going to withdraw it all. Hopefully that will be enough to find a room to rent somewhere.

I'll find my feet.

I have to.

Maybe learning that my sister won't have any kind of life of her own was the reality check I needed.

Only once there are sixty miles between me and Patrick do I stop at a gas station. I change into my funeral outfit, fix my hair, touch up my lipstick. It's liberating, even as I feel grief that I'll never see my sister again.

I toss my diner uniform in the trash.

Life is wild the way it sometimes gives you polar opposite experiences. Loss and gain. Joy and grief.

About a mile from the crematorium, a large puff of steam emits from beneath the hood of my car.

"No, no, no," I mutter, pulling over to the side of the road. "Not now."

I'm no mechanic, but I know a blown radiator when I see one. There's no way I can afford to fix it. Fuck my luck. I place my head down on the steering wheel and wince, before sitting back up. The clock on my phone tells me it's forty minutes to the service; the walk will take at least twenty.

Quickly, I switch out my dress shoes for the sneakers I packed, putting the dress shoes in my purse. I'll change when I get there. There's no way I can carry my luggage, so I take the money, lock everything else up in the trunk, and send myself a reminder of my car's location.

Then I walk.

Sure, I'll be sweaty. But at least I'll be there for my sister.

Perhaps I should have told my parents. But I doubt they would have come. They'd have told me to stay home with Patrick. And my sister, for all her faults, deserves to be remembered by someone who loved her.

I try to straighten out the creases in my black dress from driving, but it's no use. The way my luck is running, it's gonna rain and ruin it anyway. If it did, I think I might just lie down in the dirt and let the water carry me away, but there isn't a cloud in the sky.

As I approach the small crematorium building Penny told me the service would be at, I'm a little overwhelmed. While I work at a diner, I don't generally like big groups of people.

It's probably appropriate that the service isn't being held in a church because my sister was not the slightest bit religious. At least, as I remember her, she wasn't. But my decade-old memories remain focused on the cool and rebellious older sister. The thrill seeker, the life liver.

My life could have been so different if I had been more like her. A little more rebellious. A little less good. Following all the rules has gotten me nowhere.

There's something liberating in knowing I won't have to follow anyone else's rules ever again.

I step into the cool of the building where people are milling about. There are probably about twenty people here. And they are all women, but most of them ignore me. Not in a cruel way, but the careless way that happens when everyone is there with their friends, and you aren't. An usher of sorts leads us into a part of the crematorium that looks like a cross between a cheap hotel lobby and a chapel.

There is a photograph on the coffin, and it's my sister, but it isn't. She looks nothing like I remember, and yet exactly the same. Tattoos snake up the once blemish-free tan skin. And she looks old. Much older than her years should allow.

My heart aches that life has not been easy for either of us. It's hard to find blessings when you're surrounded by dirt.

I dream of an escape from the grind of life. I wonder if Mercy had a place I can stay at. I wonder if she had a husband, if he'll let me stay a couple of days to find my feet.

Then I allow myself to do the thing I've been avoiding. I look at her coffin. Like, really look at it. My sister is in there.

The only one I have.

The one I hoped would one day waltz back into my life, suck me into her orbit, and take me with her.

And the first tear falls.