Read Online Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman - Free Book Online

Elias an offended glare.
    I didn’t say anything during the drive home. Nothing about him smoking in my car. We stomped back into the house, right into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my sister, Candy, was fussing around with a jelly roll cake. She had a big bowl of frosting on the island and was spreading it onto the cake in the pan. Mom asked, “You give the Larsens those cookies?”
    Elias grunted a yes.
    Candy licked her thumb and looked at Elias with reproach. “Well, you’re not giving them my Yule log cake.”
    “Nobody wants your Yule log cake, Candy.”
    “I’m just making sure. Since three-quarters of the Christmas cookies in this house just went down the street and now my boys hardly have any.”
    “Don’t worry about it, Candy,” Mom scolded, low voiced. To Elias she said, “Did she like the cookies?”
    “She,” Candy blustered. “Is there only one Larsen now?”
    “Goddamn it, Candy,” said Elias. “Lay off.”
    She shrugged and sucked the frosting from her index finger. “Don’t bark at me , Eli. Cade’s the one I’m surprised at, getting engaged while he’s off at school and then coming home to visit a girl he had a relationship with.”
    I set my gloves on the table and didn’t dignify that with a reply. She hadn’t brought it up for any other reason except to imply to Elias that he was pursuing my sloppy seconds. Elias, though, took the bait like a raccoon to a tin of cat food. He kicked out the chair he’d been unlacing his boot against so it skidded across the kitchen floor just past Candy. His voice projected in a straight line. “What part of ‘lay off’ don’t you understand?”
    “Eli,” said our mother in her soft voice, soothing, imploring. She said it again, and for a second I flashed on the time he fell out of that oak tree while we were building the tree house, knocked himself unconscious. She had pulled his head onto her lap then, whispering to him while we waited for the ambulance.
    “She doesn’t know when to quit,” he shouted, still looking at Candy. “Mind your own damn business, will you? Bake your stupid cake and shut your freakin’ mouth for once.”
    He shoved another chair across the floor for good measure, then stormed off through the back porch, his bootlaces ticking against the floor. The back door slammed. A minute later we all heard the whack of that ax slicing into what was left of the tree. Then again, and again.
    It was things like that that made me leave Jill back in Maryland for the second year in a row. And it wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Dodge hadn’t even showed up.
    I still remembered the day Elias announced he’d enlisted in the army. It was during that whole Piper pregnancy scare. Mom looked really startled, and Dodge gave him this peeved-off look and said, “What the hell’d you go and do that for?” That was the giddiest I’ve ever seen Elias look. I knew what he was thinking: I’m finally getting out from under your thumb, you redneck motherfucker . He and I had both left home for damn good reasons. We didn’t belong here in this house. It was like the year Dodge built Candy a garden edged with pressure-treated lumber—it didn’t look too bad from the outside, but all season the chemicals leached in and leached in, poisoning everything that grew there. And here we all were again, boxed in by the same dirty lumber. But not for long. Not together.
    * * *
    Maybe half the reason I was so smooth about it when Jill broke the pregnancy news to me was that last time all my histrionics had turned out to be nothing. Maybe I felt that this time would have the same outcome, because the panic with the Jill situation was more of a slow burn. But this time it wasn’t going away, and in addition to that, after a few weeks she was so sick. She couldn’t even go to class anymore, and her stupid roommate was complaining. I called up Stan, and he said it was fine if she crashed at his place for a little while until we