Read Online The Neighbors by Ania Ahlborn - Free Book Online

relishing the tale.
    Drew clenched his jaw, his rage bubbling up now as strongly as it had then. He had begged her to go out with him so many times—to hop into his truck so he could take her out for a burger, so they could go to a movie; he wanted her to see that the world still existed and she could still be a part of it. He had tried to help her beat her disease, had even suggested that they pick up and move somewhere new, start fresh. She had refused him every time. And yet she had temporarily beaten her agoraphobia—not to make her only child happy, not to make his life easier, not to make up for all the mistakes she had made, but to fill the empty liquor cabinet at home.
    “So I packed up my stuff and I moved out,” he said bitterly. “I didn’t want to keep any part of my old life, especially not the part that supported her for the past five years, so I quit my job.” He paused, corrected himself. “
Left
my job, I guess. I hadn’t missed a day of work in like...” He shook his head, not able to remember the most recent unscheduled day he had taken off. “I don’t know. A really long time. And I felt really bad about it, you know? The people there were great, and I should have put in my two weeks, but I just had to get out of there.” He looked up, desperate for approval, for some glimmer of understanding. “Out of my house, I mean. And I didn’t want her to find me, or send someone to find me, or, I don’t know...” His words drifted off. He looked back down to his hands again.
    “That’s it?” Cryer asked after a painfully awkward few seconds.
    “That’s it,” Drew told him. And just like that, he felt terrible.
    He had raced back home after catching her along the side of the road, nearly mowing down their mailbox when he careened into the driveway. He stumbled out of the pickup like a drunk, careened up the porch steps, fumbled with his house keys. He dropped them once, then again, and finally flung himself inside, slamming the door behind him so hard and fast, all that was missing was the murderer, the ax, and the chase. With his backto the door, he saw the house he’d lived in his entire life through a new set of eyes. The house that his Gamma had lovingly decorated and his PopPop had kept up for so long was now little more than a living corpse. The sunny yellow color that had danced across the walls had faded to a sad brown. Nothing was clean. Nothing was new. There was no hope to be found, not in any of it.
    The one thing that was truly different about that familiar landscape was that Julie Morrison wasn’t in it. Instead, the self-proclaimed agoraphobe was dragging her feet along the road, two bags of booze heavy at her sides.
    He had been betrayed. By his mother. His
mom
.
    He stumbled forward, his vision blurred by tears, and did what he had only seen done in movies: he began to destroy the place. He dislodged the couch cushions and tossed them across the room, one of them clipping a small table full of knickknacks. Small ceramic figurines tinkled against the hardwood floor like rain, exploding on impact—all of his mother’s precious trinkets, annihilated by a pang of hate. He grabbed the coffee table by its rim, overturning it with a sudden upward shove. Empty bottles flew up; glass tumblers spiraled through the air; a full ashtray spun like a Frisbee before crashing to the floor. When the table hit the ground, it fell with a cacophony of shattering glass, bottles exploding beneath its weight. The stink of alcohol wafted up from the floor. He backed away from the mess, knocking a lamp off a side table as he did, wiping at his eyes.
    She had asked for it. She deserved it. But no matter which way he spun it or how he explained it, it boiled down to one thing: he had left her—an ill, mentally unstable woman; his own mother—alone. It didn’t matter how much he had done for her or how hard he had tried, because in the end he hadn’t tried hard enough. He had failed. And he had