"So you walked out," she said.
"I walked out. I called Kyle. I had him drive me here instead of anywhere else. I don't really know why. I think I wanted to sit somewhere I used to be okay." Shelby lowered her hands. "I didn't call anybody because I didn't want anybody to talk me out of it. And I didn't open it because I didn't want to do it. And I've just been sitting here in between. I'm so tired of being in between, Kris."
Kristen looked at the tinfoil square. It was so small. It was smaller than a matchbook. It was the size of the piece of chewing gum she'd once watched Shelby, aged six, try to flush down a toilet to see if it would come back.
"I'm going to say some things," Kristen said, "and I need you to let me get through them."
Shelby nodded.
"I'm so angry at you I can't feel my hands. I'm angry that you lied to me for eight weeks. I'm angry that you were blue on a kitchen floor and the person you asked for was my husband. I'm angry that you let me send you heart emojis about a crawdad. I'm angry that a woman I met one time knows what my sister looks like when she's dying, and I don't." She took a breath. "And I'm angry at me. Because you weren't wrong. At Tanner's birthday. I said I would take him. I meant it. I was proud of myself for meaning it."
"Kris—"
"Let me finish. I have been taking care of you since I was twelve years old, Shel. I made your lunches with whatever was in the cupboard. I signed your report cards with Mom's name. I got guardianship when I was twenty and you were thirteen and I didn't know what a 401(k) was. I didn't know how to do any of it. The only thing I knew was that if I held on hard enough, nothing bad could get through. That's all I had. Holding on." Her voice broke and she let it. "And somewhere in there I forgot you weren't thirteen anymore. You were a grown woman with a kid and a job and a neighbor who brings you orchids, and I still talked to you like you were a kid I had to keep out of the barn. So you went to the one person in the family you thought wouldn't do that. And he didn't. And I hate him for it, and I think I understand it, and I hate that I understand it."
Shelby was looking at her now, really looking, with Tanner's grey-green eyes.
"Jolene said something to me tonight," Kristen went on. "She said she didn't think you were afraid I'd take Tanner. She said she thought you were afraid I'd be right."
Shelby's face did something Kristen had not seen it do since they were children, a kind of collapsing, every defense going at once.
"I was afraid you'd look at me the way you looked at Mom," she whispered. "At the end. At the hospital. Like you'd already finished being sad about it. Like she was a chore you'd already done."
That landed somewhere under Kristen's ribs and stayed there. She thought of their mother in the hospital bed, yellow with it, the IV taped to the back of her small hand. She remembered standing at the foot of the bed with a clipboard of insurance forms. She remembered thinking, very clearly, I have no more feelings for this. I spent them all. She had not known it showed.
"I'm not done being sad about you," she said. "I'm never going to be done. That's the problem, Shel. That's why I hold on so hard. Because you're the only one I'm not done with."