Aunt Riley, Daddy’s older sister (my bossy older sister, Daddy called her), told her not to listen to what people said. “You know your mama better than almost anyone,” Riley said. “Don’t you forget that.”

Riley might be older than her parents, but she was much cooler than them, and one of Olive’s very favorite people in the universe. Olive always gloated a little walking around town with her, hoping kids from school might see them and it would somehow elevate Olive’s status. Riley had tons of tattoos, an asymmetrical haircut with bangs that were dyed blue, and often wore blue lipstick to match it. She lived in an apartment in a funky old Victorian, worked at a building salvage yard, went to college part-time, and volunteered at the historical society and for Habitat for Humanity. She’d even gone down to Nicaragua one summer to help build houses for poor people. For a while, Riley was apprenticing to be a tattoo artist and kept sketchbooks full of designs: carefully inked drawings of skulls, flowers, and animals, and page after page of fancy lettering. Riley had this I’m gonna be my own person and not give a crap what anyone thinks kind of attitude that Olive totally admired and aspired to. And she really did boss Olive’s dad around (or tried to, anyway). She was always telling him what to do, and he usually nodded and went along with whatever it was, whether it was something like “Time to cut the grass, Dusty,” or “That shirt looks like shit, go put on a clean one.” Olive knew her dad and Riley didn’t have the best childhood—their mom drank and their dad was hardly ever home, so Aunt Riley basically raised Daddy and had been taking care of him and bossing him around his whole life; it was just a matter of habit now.

After Mama left, Riley suggested to her dad that maybe she could move in. “Just for a while. To help you guys out until Lori comes back.” Daddy said he appreciated the offer but that they were doing fine, really.

Riley was always bringing Olive strange gifts: kumquats, a slide rule, a piece of amber with a bug trapped inside. “What can I say—weird stuff always makes me think of you,” Riley would say with a wink and a ruffling of Olive’s hair as she handed the gifts over.

    Riley had her own collection of weird stuff in her apartment: animal bones, a crystal ball, tarot cards, and pendulums. She was always meditating and setting up little altars for various occasions, like if she wanted a new job or for some guy she liked to like her back. She liked to talk about dreams and always made Olive tell hers when she spent the night. She believed dreams were important and bought Olive a little blue journal with a sun and moon on the cover so she could write them down. Olive thought the notebook was too pretty to write her dumb dreams in, so she put it on her bookshelf to save for a time when she might have something worthwhile to use it for.

“Have you ever had an experience where you knew something was going to happen before it did?” she asked Olive once. Olive said she hadn’t and Riley looked disappointed. Sometimes she’d read Olive’s tarot cards, to tell her future, which always seemed hopeful and promising when Riley interpreted it—even when she got cards that scared Olive, like the Tower, which showed a tower on fire after lightning struck it and blew the top off, two people tumbling out of it to the ground.

“The Tower, that’s turmoil, sudden change. Your life might feel like it’s in upheaval, but really, you’ve got to remember that with change comes positive stuff, too. You’re gonna grow from this. With destruction comes transformation, right? Sometimes you’ve gotta break down the structures you surround yourself with to get to the truth, to find the core strength of who you are. Does that make sense, Ollie?” And Olive nodded and they finished the reading, drinking bitter herbal tea that was supposed to help them both get centered and find clarity.

Riley tried hard, almost too hard, to make things better for Olive. She’d always been a fixture at their house, mostly hanging out with Mama. Riley and her mom went to antique shops, went out to play bingo and to hear bands perform at the Cider Mill out on Route 9. Daddy would get irritated (or at least pretend to be) when Riley showed up at the house to take Mama off somewhere. “My god, woman,” he’d say. “You spend more time with my sister than you do with me!” She’d laugh as she hurried off on some adventure with Riley, saying, “I only married you so I could have the best sister-in-law ever.”

    But now it was Olive Riley came to take out on adventures. Olive figured that maybe Riley was lonely, too, missing Mama and looking for company. She took Olive out for milkshakes, went for walks in the woods with her, invited Olive to come stay at her place on the weekends, where they’d watch old black-and-white horror movies and eat piles of candy. Riley always got a big bag of Swedish Fish for Olive because they were her favorite. They never talked about Mama. That felt like the point; that Riley was trying to take Olive’s mind (and her own, too, maybe) off Mama, to help her forget that her own mother had just up and left her and Daddy. But no amount of horror movies, popcorn, and Swedish Fish could make Olive forget.

Daddy, he pretended not to hear the rumors about Mama, either. He went to his job (he worked maintenance for the town, fixing roads and culverts and driving a snowplow in the winter) and came home each evening. He stopped playing cards with friends or going out for a beer in the evening. He stayed home and cooked microwave dinners for him and Olive. They were too bland and greasy—Salisbury steak, fried chicken, and mashed potatoes that didn’t taste anything like actual potatoes—but Olive smiled and swallowed them down. The only time he actually cooked real food was when Riley came, and then it was always spaghetti with spicy Italian sausages. He even splurged and bought garlic bread and a bag of premade salad. They pretended, Daddy and Olive, that this was how they ate every night, so that Riley wouldn’t worry about them.