It found its mark. Avery felt herself exhale involuntarily as the sharp point of this insult punctured her. The only recourse was to pull it out and hurl it back. She looked Lucky in the eyes.
“Better a judgmental bitch than a fucked-up addict,” she said. “Destined to follow in her footsteps.”
Bonnie’s attention snapped back from the ceiling.
“Don’t say that,” she cried. “Don’t even think that, Avery!”
But Lucky was narrowing her eyes at Avery with serpentine focus.
“I might be an addict,” she said softly. “But you’re a liar. I see you, Avery. Hypocrite.”
Avery could feel herself go cold. Was it the stealing? The cheating? Both? But she’d been so careful. How could Lucky know? And even if by some bizarre twist of fate she did, who the fuck was she to judge her?
“How dare you,” she said in a low voice.
Lucky smiled her lupine smile, exposing sharp canines.
“She’s going to leave you, you know,” she said.
Avery shook her head. As if she hadn’t been telling herself this exact thing every moment of the past week.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” she said.
“What are we talking about?” interjected Bonnie. “Avery? Has something happened with Chiti?”
The question was asked without accusation, but Avery found herself leaning away as if from a flame. She and Bonnie were two years apart, but they had always felt a little like twins. They were connected on an unconscious level, able to feel the other’s moods as instinctively as one feels shifts in the temperature, something Avery had historically found deeply comforting. But not now.
“I have no idea what she’s talking about,” she said. “She’s just being a bitch.”
Could Bonnie feel it, Avery’s temperature change? She had gone cold, but now the shame of her affair was radiating off her like an ice burn.
“You don’t deserve her,” said Lucky.
Avery looked down. You think I don’t know that? she wanted to shout. But she wasn’t going to let Lucky win that easily.
“You’re too young and stupid to know how fortunate you are,” she said slowly. “That we don’t all get what we deserve.”
“What does that mean?” asked Lucky.
Don’t say it, thought Avery. Don’t say it. But she did.
“Because if we did, it would have been you in that casket, not her.”
The regret was everywhere, instantly. Lucky looked at her in shocked silence, the same suspended quiet that comes after a toddler has fallen down and not yet decided to cry. But Lucky did not cry. She blinked back the tears that instantly filled her eyes and rubbed her face roughly with her palm.
“Well, I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” she said and walked out the door.
Bonnie ran after her, but Avery knew Lucky was not coming back after that. Then the front door slammed, and Bonnie returned. She looked at Avery with a mixture of horror, contempt, and pity.
“How could you say that to her?”
Avery sat down on a pile of clothes and dropped her head in her hands.
“Don’t, Bonnie, please.”
“Do you have any idea how fragile she is right now? What if she drinks?”
Avery exhaled a weary sigh.
“I can’t get her drunk and you can’t keep her sober. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.”
“But I did get her sober. I…I gave everything to get her through this week.”
“Keep, not get, Bonnie.”
“So, what, you’re just going to give up on her?”
Avery shook her head. She was so tired.
“I have carried this family on my back for too many years.” She sighed, then added, apropos of nothing, “I wanted to go to Berkeley for college!”
Bonnie barked a laugh of disbelief.
“You went to Columbia! It was hardly community college. And then you did leave. You disappeared to California for a year before you moved to London. You’ve always done what you wanted.”
That made Avery sit up.
“You think I wanted to pay for this apartment for the past year?” she countered. “I didn’t want you two to lose your home and her. I wanted you and Lucky to have a place to come back to if you needed it. Everything I do is to protect you. I taught you all to swim. You know who taught me? No one! I had to pick it up myself, or I’d drown. I’m speaking both literally and metaphorically here.”
