Read Online Black River by S. M. Hulse - Free Book Online Page B

counter in the kitchen. The table was a small cherry wood square, set against one wall of the living room. Tonight Dennis sat on the side nearest the kitchen, where Wes always used to sit, and Wes sat opposite, in Claire’s old place. It put his back to the door, but that was better than sitting the way they used to, the way they had on that last night.
    Dennis spoke while Wes’s head was still bowed, grace running silently in his head. “I hear you gave Scott a ride into town today.”
    Wes thought his
Amen,
looked up. “Seemed like he needed it.”
    â€œDidn’t rip off your truck’s stereo or anything, did he?”
    â€œDo you really got to do this tonight, Dennis?”
    Dennis held up a hand. “Fine, sorry.”
    Wes watched his stepson push a single pea back and forth with his fork, a millimeter one way, a millimeter the other. Wes wasn’t sure if this edginess was because of his presence or because that was just who Dennis was. Everything he did, every move he made, it was like he was trying to hold back, keep from exploding. It gave him an odd aura of stillness, but with a great deal of force behind each minute movement. “Seriously,” Dennis said finally. “What’d you think of him?”
    â€œWhy ask me? Ain’t like you’ve ever bothered with my opinion before.” Hell.
Hell.
Why say that? Must be this house. This damned table.
    Dennis dropped his fork onto his plate. “Jesus, Wes. Do
you
have to do this?”
    â€œSorry. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Let it go.” He took a long swallow of water, set the glass down harder than he meant to. “Scott. I don’t know. Seems like a nice enough kid, I guess. Not real happy to be here.”
    â€œYou blame him?”
    â€œNo.” Wes set his fork down, pushed his plate away, most of the food still on it. No appetite since Claire died. “I’ll tell you one thing, though: that kid don’t seem especially interested in horses.” Dennis looked up, and Wes saw he wasn’t saying anything his stepson didn’t already know. “Which I suppose means he must really like you.”
    Dennis smiled, not at Wes. “And you find that hard to believe?”
    He noticed Dennis’s nose all of a sudden, the way it ruined his profile. Wes broke it eighteen years ago, at this table, the one and only time he’d ever laid a hand on him in anger. Hadn’t strictly meant to, but he still wasn’t sorry for it; Dennis had deserved that and more. What he thought he might be sorry for was the afterward. The leaving. It was a new idea, that he might be sorry for that. And he thought again about Scott, the anger that poured out of the kid so you could almost smell it on him, sharp and sour. “Dennis,” Wes said, looking back across the table, “I don’t think I know you well enough anymore to say.”
    Â 
    He stayed up late that night, later than Dennis, though he had church in the morning. He walked around the silent house, treading close to the walls to keep the floorboards from creaking. Still a house he could move through in the dark. Still a house whose shadows he knew, the cast of moonlight through the uncurtained windows familiar as it fell.
    The walls were most different. Gone, of course, were the things he and Claire had taken with them when they’d left: the cross Wes’s father had carved from a knotted piece of deadfall; the wooden calendar with a painting of a goose Claire ordered another year’s worth of pages for every November; the small poster from the last time the band played Harvest, a few weeks before the riot. Gone, too, were the things they had left behind: a handful of pleasant but generic art prints, a collection of haphazardly framed family photographs. The walls of the house now were nearly bare, cool white almost everywhere he looked.
    The exception was the space over the mantel, where Claire’s wide