Read Online In the Middle of All This by Fred G. Leebron - Free Book Online Page B

roof above the second floor was all black, the chimney white. In the windows she wanted to paint their small faces, but they were hiding, terrified, the house soon to rock with their mother’s voice as she spied the broken kitchen window and pounded up the stairs. I’m going to let you have it! she shouted. I’m really going to let you have it. How old were they then—nine, seven, and three? Don’t, they would beg, as she swung the belt. Don’t.
    I’ll never know, Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking as she watched the painting of her mother, I’ll never know what kind I would have been.
    Late at night he sat with the cats at the bar in the basement, sipping another glass of wine and taking one-shot hits of marijuana. Upstairs, in the bedroom, she waited. If he held out long enough, she’d be asleep. Tomorrow was her teaching day. He’d only have Max, laundry, bills to pay, dishes, Sarah to amuse after school, dinner. He could walk around in a fog if he had to. Do you really need to do that? Lauren had said when he slid toward the basement.
    The bar—which they hadn’t touched since moving in—had a mirrored back bolted onto black glitter board. THE CAPTAIN’S RULE IS LAW , declared a sign nailed to one of the cabinet doors, COCKTAIL HOUR ABOARD : 7:00 A.M . TO 6:59 A.M . DAILY AND SUNDAYS . He swiveled on the pink stool. He loved this bar. He pushed himself off and reached behind the counter and brought out a pack of light cigarettes. He and Elizabeth used to shoplift LifeSavers together from the Acme on Woodbine, when he was six and she was ten. In a hideout by the creek, they’d re-count their loot and divide it. Ten years later they planned an elaborate tour of Europe together. They took a train all the way from Germany to Greece, boarded a ferry to an island, climbed steps to a white villa, purchased rooftop accommodations for fifty cents each. When he was in college in New Jersey, he visited her once every few weeks in New York, where they ate and drank in tapas bars and he pretended that he liked her friends from work. One New Year’s Eve they dressed up and went to all the parties, told everyone they were each other’s dates. That kind of crap.
    Before he was born, an uncle whom he would be named after lay dying of cancer, his brain growing mish-mashed. Close the Venetian blinds, he’d ask, when he meant: Turn off the television. His wife, sweet faced, utterly gentle, attended him. They were childless. “A man as sick as I am,” he managed to say once, quite clearly, “does not tell his wife his thoughts.” What did that mean? Martin now wondered. Regret? Bitterness? Hatred? What would be left between him and Elizabeth if he stood beside her a last time? Would all the accrued memory feel something like mercy, or was mercy the release from exhaustion and pain? Couldn’t denial—the instinct that even as you slipped under you still might emerge again—be merciful? Was grace acceptance or wishful thinking? He wanted to know . He couldn’t know.
    He drew on the cigarette, in the mirror watched himself fill with smoke, then clouded the basement. The cats snarled and chased each other over stalagmites of toys. “Mel,” he warned. “Chance.” They ignored him. “Are cats smart?” his mother once asked him, after a weekend of baby-sitting while he and Lauren had visited London. “I mean, they don’t come when you call them.” “I don’t know,” he’d said. “Well, I don’t think they are,” she’d said. He’d scooped up Max and sat at the kitchen table. They’d arrived only a few minutes ago. “Daddy,” Max said, “I miss you.” “I missed you, too,” he said. “I missed you terribly.” “Daddy,” Max said, “I miss you tewibly, too.” The boy put his damp face into the hollow of Martin’s neck and