The Winter Sister by Megan Collins

Author:Megan Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

18

Somehow, living in Providence, I’d found myself in a place of ease. Strange, now, to think of it, now that I was so far from that world, sucked instead back into the one I’d thought I’d peeled off of me like a sunburn. It had only been a few weeks since my last shift at Steve’s, but already, I could barely remember how to load the ink into the gun. I could remember wiping beads of blood from flesh, but when I pictured those moments, wearing those blue latex gloves, it was someone else’s hand I saw.

I texted with Lauren on Sunday, trying to get back to that place. Mom and I were barely speaking. After spitting and sobbing more words to each other on Thursday than we had in sixteen years, we’d spent most of the next few days in the living room—together, watching TV, but silent. Now, while Mom flipped through channels, I huddled up with my phone on the couch, texting Lauren about Wolf Bro, the nickname we’d given to one of her clients. He was a guy in his midthirties who always boasted about the women he’d “beasted” over the weekend, and he’d been scheduled to come back that week for session three of his wolf tattoo.

“Ugh,” Lauren wrote. “Wolf Bro now wants a full moon done over his entire right pec, because—exact quote—‘a true wolf needs something to howl at.’ ”

“Genius,” I replied.

“I know, right? Because how else will the chicks at the gym know what an animal he is in the sheets?”

“Haha.”

“I swear, it took everything I had not to scream at him that no self-respecting woman would ever fuck a guy with a wolf tattoo.”

“Haha,” I typed again, but I didn’t even smile.

I tried to be engaged in the conversation. I tried to picture us in our apartment, handing a bag of Doritos back and forth as we laughed about Wolf Bro. I even saw us swiping orange crumbs onto the floor and joking that Claude, our fictional French housekeeper, would vacuum them up later. But every time I went to type a response to Lauren, to embed myself deeper into the comfort of that fantasy, I found myself nearly writing what was really on my mind instead, all the unanswered questions I’d collected over the last week: What had Tommy Dent wanted with Persephone’s things, and what had happened to them after all this time?

And why had he told the police to talk to the mo—

“So how’s it going with your mom?” Lauren texted, and I was grateful to be yanked away from the skipping record of those questions. “Is it weird between you guys?”

“Yeah,” I responded quickly. “It’s really weird.”

“Is she acting like you’re her personal bartender instead of her nurse?”

“No, she’s actually sober. Apparently it hurts when she drinks now, because . . . cancer.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Lauren replied. “So then have you guys talked about it? How she drank herself into oblivion for half your life?”

“There’s nothing to talk about really,” I said.

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