House of Blues

company
executive and a professional mom. Georgina, her mother, had had to be
a pro, because two more children came after Sugar. The stair steps
were Michael, Patrice, Eugenie, Patrick, and Peter. Sugar had been
nicknamed because the other kids couldn't say her name.
    I didn't even get my own damn name.
    Michael was the oldest, Peter was the youngest,
Patrice was the first girl, and Patrick was a boy, which meant he
outranked her. Everyone made that perfectly obvious.
    There were four years between Michael and Patrice.
Georgina probably thought she was off the hook when Sugar came along.
    She took it out on me too. But she was oh-so-glad to
have two more boys. There had never been anyone to play with. The two
older kids had each other, and so did the two younger ones. Nobody
ever even noticed Sugar; no one cared about her.
    She should know. She used to stage crying jags and
lock herself in the bathroom, just to get noticed.
    It didn't work.
    (But one thing, she knew what that was all about;
Evie used to pull the same thing, always trying to get attention, and
Sugar never let her get away with it.)
    She got all A's. That didn't work either.
    Once she wore the same clothes for a week. Nobody
even said anything.
    She had read that you spent your whole life fighting
the patterns set early in life, and she'd certainly found it so.
    I feel like I'm invisible; like I have to raise my
hand and say, "Excuse me, I'm here. Would you look me in the eye
now and then? Would you just pretend for one second I'm as important
as my husband? Or even that you see me?"
    That was the way things had been for her. Whereas
nothing really awful had ever happened to any of her children.
    At least until the Bad Day.
    The pictures in this album had all been taken before
that; back when the world was young and innocent.
    That was the worst day of her life, or probably any
of their lives. She would never forget the look on that poor child's
face . . .or the wound, so angry, so inhuman-looking; or the sounds
she made, later, during her therapy.
    Sugar shook her body, willing the memory away.
    But that was just one day in our whole lives; and in
the end, it brought us closer together. We all had to rally around in
the face of adversity. Arthur even dropped his current mistress. I'm
pretty sure he did, anyway. He acted almost normal for a while.
    Sugar closed the album and, to her intense surprise,
found herself sinking to the floor, great, hopeless sobs escaping
from her diaphragm.
    When the phone rang, she
thought, Reed. It's Reed! And she was almost right. It was Grady,
with news of Dennis.
    * * *
    Grady was trying to recover, somehow make sense out
of Dennis's story. Dennis had phoned him to come bail him out. The
police had found heroin in his room, and they were going to use it to
keep him.
    Grady didn't know what to do. His mother was at
Dennis's house; he couldn't let her junkie son-in-law move in with
her, and he certainly wasn't going to move her into his own house. On
the other hand, Sugar really had no right to be in Dennis's house.
Sugar had settled the whole matter herself by saying she wanted to go
home anyway. He'd found her there, cleaning up or something. "Tough
old bird" was too mild a phrase.
    Dennis was going to be a problem, though. No question
he was using again, and Grady didn't see any signs that his
brother-in-law was going to stop.
    He should have left Dennis in jail—he'd have had to
detox. But in the end he couldn't do it. He liked Dennis, and even if
he hadn't, it would have been too mean.
    He believed his story too.
    Oh, yes.
    The ring of truth was more like a peal.
    That was like Evie. Exactly like her. To get drunk
and go nuts like that.
    That was Evie.
    "She's bad! She's always been bad," his
mother had blurted. She was a real primitif ,
his mother was.
    But Evie—what was she?
    This was the part of the story he was trying to make
sense of, that he had struggled with for years. Who and what was
Evie, and how did she come to be?
    The Evie Phenomenon, he called it, and he thought it
might be different from Evie herself, but he wasn't sure. His parents
had considered her devil spawn without apparently seeing the irony of
it.
    The piece he was working on when he got the phone
call was called "The House of Blues Before The Thing."
Oddly enough, it was about her.
    She was so far out of control.
    So terrifying. Somehow,
everything she did ended up being frightening, he didn't know why.
"It was a Sunday afternoon," he had