I hadn't known she'd had a therapist. I hadn't known she'd had a sister named Tammy, really, beyond a name on a Christmas card, or a mother, or a trailer, or a Pontiac. I'd been living with her for three years.
"That's not an excuse," Carla said. "I want to be clear about that. It's just the reason. The excuse would be something else." She took a long breath. "The excuse would be that I was jealous."
The baritone on the radio started "Farther Along." Carla reached over and smacked the dashboard, hard, with the flat of her hand, and the station went to static, and she left it there.
"I moved into your mother's house," she said. "Into her bedroom. With her curtains. I cooked in her kitchen with her pans. Every drawer I opened, there was something of hers in it. A grocery list. A hair tie. A birthday card to your daddy in a drawer in the nightstand, June, on my side of the bed, that said To my whole heart." Her voice didn't break. I think she wouldn't let it. "And every time the two of you went quiet at supper, I knew where you'd gone, and I knew I couldn't follow, and I knew I wasn't supposed to say anything about it, because what kind of monster is jealous of a woman who died in a grocery store at thirty-four? So I didn't say anything. I moved the mugs instead. I moved the pictures. And every time I moved something you looked at me like I'd hit you, and your dad rubbed his neck and said nothing, and I kept moving things, because I couldn't stop, because if I stopped I'd have to say it."
We passed the church with the green roof. I saw it go by in the headlights, and the sign out front that said FALL REVIVAL OCT 18–21 ALL WELCOME.
"And the quilt," she said. "The quilt was the last place. All your other things you'd let me touch. That one you wouldn't. You'd come home from school and go up to your room and lie down under it with your shoes on, and I'd stand at the bottom of the stairs and think, she's under there with them. With her mother and her grandmother. And I'm out here. And we're moving to a new house in a week, where I thought, finally, finally, nobody will have died.