Page 59 of No Sweeter Poison

Bertha comes back a few minutes later to take our orders and Dahlia is determined to sign “please” and “thank you” after every other word. Bertha laughs and I can tell she’s endeared by the effort because she adjusts Dahlia’s hands whenever she signs incorrectly. When it’s the two of us again, she swirls a straw inside her cup, trying to dig out the ice cubes from the bottom.

“Did you come here a lot? After your dad died?”

The question catches me off guard. I’m not sure how to respond at first.

“You said you ran away a lot as a teenager. Is that why?”

I busy myself with pouring more water into my cup even though it’s ready to spill over. “Among other things.”

“Diego said—”

“You’re more curious than usual.”

She closes her mouth and sinks back in her seat. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“The kinds of questions you ask.”

Dahlia waits a beat. “I hardly know anything about you guys. Asking questions makes you feel less like scary strangers and more like people.”

I don’t like talking about my family, much less myself. The last time anyone got close enough I was jilted at the alter by a woman who put a knife in my back. But if Dahlia’s asking then maybe that means she cares. And if she cares then…?

I shake the thought from my head.

“I never really got along with my father,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “Everyone says it’s because I’m too much like my mother but I think the real problem was that I was too much like him.”

Dahlia manages to get an ice cube to the top of her glass but instead of reaching for it, she lets it sink to the bottom again.

“He and my mom separated when I was little. He’d come around once in a while but he was mostly an absentee father. It wasn’t until I hit my teen years that he actually bothered with me—maybe he thought it’d be easier to parent a child that was older and more independent. Instead, we fought all the time. Especially after my mom died and he was inconvenienced with the responsibility of my upbringing.”

“How did your mom die?”

“She wrapped herself around a tree.”

I almost knock my glass over.

“You’re not serious.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” she replies, grinning in a way that’s almost unsettling. “She was obsessed with my father. Legally, they were married but on and off for years. She found out he was dating one of her cousins and told him that if he didn’t end it, she was going to kill herself. She wasn’t good at much but she sure knew how to follow through on a threat.”

“At least you have a sense of humor about it.”

“I know…it helps that my parents were terrible people.”

I study her for a shift in emotion or some sort of giveaway that she may not be telling the whole truth. I find none. “Not even your mother was different?”

She shrugs. “She was fine when I was little. Very loving and affectionate. But something awful happens when you grow up and realize the adults around you aren’t perfect. That they’re flawed human beings with their own demons. The moment you see them for who they truly are, there’s no going back. The older I got the more we clashed. And then she died a few months before I turned fifteen so there wasn’t much to do about it anyway.”

“That’s why Karina is so important to you.”

Her breath catches a bit. “Yeah. She means everything to me.”

Silence follows her statement.

“There. I showed you mine, now you have to show me yours.”