Read Online Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) by Robert Rodi - Free Book Online Page A

a young bride who had not liked the goings-on in Vietnam, not one bit (well, Lionel reflected, opposites do attract), and who then, only four years later, and just a few months after his wife had discovered a curious lump on her breast, had found himself a widower. Having lost his commission and his spouse, he’d spent a brief spell brooding and wallowing in bitterness until his sister came to help care for his three young children. Aunt Ramona was two years older than her brother, and even though he had been a Chinese prisoner of war during the Korean “conflict” (as he still insisted on calling it) and had a chest full of medals as mementos (or, more accurately, proof) of his valor under fire, she treated him like the most tiresome of adolescents and dismissed virtually every one of his opinions with a disappointed shake of her head and an, “Oh, Sonny, please.” Of course she drove him mad. He responded to her looseness and irreverence by adopting the kind of manner he might have had had he never left the military at all — had he, in fact, gone on to make general.
    And this was the mood of the house in which Lionel and Eugene and their sister, Greta, had grown up — and in which Greta in fact still lived (she was a twenty-seven-year-old guitarist in an all-girl Christian heavy-metal rock band called Terrible Swift Sword; in other words, unemployable and broke). Lionel, who had the added incentive of discovering himself gay, had fled the house at eighteen for college and never gone back for more than a visit. But each occurrence was as trying as a year in a Soviet gulag. His father and Aunt Ramona seemed to exist now only to bedevil each other, and whenever Lionel went to see them, each clutched at his presence as if at a new weapon to wield against the other. He would often end up feeling utterly battered about by the time he staggered out the front door for his car. And with his sister ever more pious and painted-faced, he found he had less and less to say to her, too. Even the family spaniel, Killer, whom Lionel had loved, had died the year before of extreme old age (despite which the Colonel still viewed him as being AWOL, and could not speak his name without the bitterness of the betrayed).
    So it was an exercise in pain and futility, revealing the ultimate absurdity of the universe, that Lionel should go so far out of his way, undergo such agony as this traffic jam, to suffer a visit which he was certain would effectively crush his will to live.
    The sudden flash of brake lights just a yard ahead of his front bumper startled him out of his dim reverie. He slammed on his own brake and shouted a curse at the car ahead (a much more vile curse than he would’ve dared utter face to face). He looked around to get his bearings; the blocks of gray, grime-packed buildings on each side of the highway had given way to tree-dotted neighborhoods. While lost in thought, he’d inched his way into the suburbs — and it had been relatively painless after all.
    Still, this reminder that his fellow drivers were an unpredictable and dangerous lot left him less willing to let his mind wander again, so he nosed his way into the right-hand lane, slipped down the next exit ramp, and drove the rest of the way to Western Springs on ordinary, sweet-smelling suburban thoroughfares.
    By the time he reached his father’s house — an undistinguished two-story colonial encircled by evergreen bushes that no one bothered to keep up (some were even dead, sitting brown amidst the green ones like rotting teeth) — the skies, which had been cloudy for days, had finally broken, and a dull, drizzling rain had begun. Lionel parked on the street and hopped out of the car, then hunched his shoulders against the rain and trotted up the front walk. It was seven-sixteen.
    Before he could ring the bell, his father opened the door for him, wearing a white shirt and tie, as he always did. “You’re twenty minutes late,” he said