The Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis Page A

its bad smells and horrible medicine.
    â€œTake it easy, buddy,” I say, patting him back down. “The vet says you need to stay here a little bit longer, okay? You’re going to be all right, though. Everything’s turned out fine.”
    â€¢ • •
    Rosie and I grab breakfast at the Pigeon Forge Diner next to the motel. After we both eat large helpings of bacon and biscuits and gravy, she nails me.
    â€œYou going to tell me what the codeine was about, Zeke?”
    The restaurant bustles with the early morning crowd. The thunk of ceramic coffee mugs hitting Formica tabletops. The scrape of spatulas against the grill as the cook manages a batch of hash browns. Truckers in baseball caps pulled low over their eyes curl over their cups, loading up on caffeine before heading out on the road. Our waitress returns to the table asking if we need anything else.
    â€œYou want some more coffee, Rosie?” I say, welcoming the distraction.
    â€œHoney,” she says to the waitress, “I don’t need anything else right now except for my brother to answer the question I asked him.”
    â€œAfraid I can’t help you with that,” the waitress says with a half smile, placing the check on the table.
    Rosie sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. Her focus is legendary in our family. When she was nine, she spent six months selling boxes of Mrs. Leland’s Golden Butter Bits candy door-to-door just to get the “500 boxes prize”—a transistor radio that broke a week after she got it. She has been known to wait weeks, sometimes years, to reach a goal when properly motivated. Her slow rise at KMG is a case in point. Getting to the bottom of big brother’s latest disaster will be one of those goals.
    A mother with two young daughters sits at the booth opposite ours. She looks in her twenties, nearing thirty. The girls could be six and four. The smallest one starts to whine for milk and the mother meets my eyes, shrugging, before signaling to the waitress. For a year in each of Honora’s and Louisa’s lives Jackie and I decided eating out was too much trouble. After a few meals where everything on their plates ended up on restaurant floors, we said we’d wait until they had reasonable table manners.
    Those problems seemed so easy. Kid can’t behave at a restaurant? Don’t eat out. Kid not ready to sit on a potty? Keep her in diapers another six months. Now the complexities of keeping them safe, of keeping them whole, overwhelm me. Mommy’s divorcing Daddy. Daddy’s sad all the time.
    There are two choices. Door number one: Spill the whole thing to my sister. Door number two: Sell her the same story I told the vet’s office. Maybe I should be honest. Tell her suicide is not for sissies. The scale of this latest failure reinforces my belief that there is nothing I can’t screw up. My brother used to be confused by the word sissies . He didn’t understand how it could be hurled at you as an insult and also be the name of three people he loved most in the world.
    When I look back at what our family had—what worked versus what didn’t—it was an unspoken belief that each of us was valuable. That each kid had something to offer. Not in the “you will be president” kind of way, though maybe Mother did mean it like that for me, but mostly in a basic, human way. You are loved. You are valued. This was an elemental truth of our childhood. When Mother fractured that truth in the fall of 1960, all but throwing Carter away, it splintered through the family—traveling from Carter, to me, to our father, and our sisters.
    â€œZeke?” Rosie claps her hands in front of my face, causing me to blink. “It’s Saturday, okay? I can sit here all damn day. I’ve got no other place to be. So you can talk to me now or you can talk to me after lunch or dinner. But you’re not leaving until you say