Free Nightbird by Edward Dee

so small, Patrick Ewing could have touched the two most distant walls
     simultaneously.
    “I’m sorry about your sister,” Ryan said, and he watched her mouth twist as she fought back tears. She was older, heavier,
     and darker than Gillian, but her legs were as long and cheekbones as pronounced. She was barefoot, bare-legged.
    Faye sat on the edge of the unmade sofa bed, which took up most of the room. She folded her legs swami style and yanked her
     shirt down between her legs. Sheets and a blanket lay half on the floor. A heavy drape covered the lone window, behind her.
     In the front center of her right thigh was a small circular scar that looked like a cigarette burn.
    “Tell me something about Gillian,” Ryan asked softly. “Who was her favorite actress?”
    “I don’t know. She never said. Meryl Streep, maybe. She liked Meryl Streep.”
    Ryan lowered himself carefully onto a beanbag chair. The light from the lamp on top of the TV was less than dim. A pair of
     cutoff jeans lay on the floor next to his feet, white pockets turned inside out. A baseball bat leaned against the wall near
     the TV table.
    “Everybody has said such wonderful things about Gillian,” Ryan said. “Not one negative comment.”
    “She was moody, sometimes,” Faye said. Then, gesturing to the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor: “But she was neater than
     me, that’s for sure.”
    Ryan saw his opening and prodded Faye to admit that Gillian was the cleanest woman on earth, often staying up all night cleaning
     her apartment. She ironed everything she wore, flossed her teeth after every meal, and washed her bedspread at the Laundromat
     in December and May. Like clockwork.
    “What kind of foods did she like?” Ryan asked.
    “Anything tart, like things made with lemons and limes. And ginger snaps.”
    “Anything else?” Ryan said, meaning food.
    But Faye misunderstood and said she was sorry, she really didn’t know that much about Gillian. They’d missed so many years
     of growing up together.
    “You didn’t grow up together?”
    “They just found me.”
    “Who just found you?”
    Faye took a deep breath and pushed her hair from her face. “Our mother gave me up when I was born,” she said. “She gave birth
     to me in Key West, and the next day she gave me to the nuns. Then she left Florida.”
    “Why?”
    “Poor, scared, fifteen years old. I can understand that.”
    “How long have you known this?”
    “First time I heard about my real mother was two years ago. Some private investigator came into the bar I worked at in Miami,
     asked a bunch of questions. Then a few days later Lynnette and Evan Stone flew in from Phoenix. Eight o’clock in the morning
     they knock on my door. ‘I’m your mom,’ Lynnette says.”
    “Knock, knock… we’re your parents.”
    “Just my mother. Evan Stone isn’t my father.”
    “Who is your father?”
    “You are,” she said, smiling for the first time. In the sliver of light coming through the opening in the drapes, he could
     see the whiteness of her teeth. “Just kidding. I don’t know, and it sounds like she don’t, either. She named some guy in the
     navy, but the private investigator couldn’t find him in the files.”
    “What made her decide to look for you?”
    “Some shrink in Arizona said she had to confront her past.”
    “And you were in Florida the whole time?”
    “With the Boudreaus, mostly. They adopted me. French Canadians. I grew up in Sarasota, Bradenton, around there. A few different
     places. I did okay.”
    Faye’s skin had a rough, blowsy look, as if weathered in cigarette smoke and long nights. But her hair was a lustrous black
     and shoulder length, her eyes dark brown and huge. You could see an inherent beauty, but a squandered beauty. If it had been
     nourished and cultivated, who knew?
    “Then you met Gillian?” Ryan said.
    “Me and Gillian hit it right off. She flew down to Miami when she found out. Brought me here. This is her old