Read Online The Town: A Novel by Chuck Hogan - Free Book Online Page A

spending so much time at the Coughlins’ house as a kid that, when Doug’s father went away, Jem’s mother’s taking him in presented little change. Krista and Doug had been a longtime, on-and-off couple, bad for each other in every way except carousing and sex. But now she couldn’t let go. She had even tried to get clean with Doug after his release from prison, just weeks after her mother’s death, but after a few months of sobriety fell out rather dramatically. For Doug, this had been a source of secret relief. She had been the heaviest of many stones roped around his neck. A couple of months later she was a couple of months pregnant and going around Town telling everybody that Doug was the father.
    Now Krista sat at the table, watching Jem down half a High Life at a gulp. “And you wonder why he don’t come down no more?” she said with smoke in her voice.
    “Fuckin’ Duggy doesn’t mind—do you, kid? His will is
strong
.” Douche-bag grin as he killed the bottle. “Maybe too strong.” The dinged-up cordless phone trilled and he snapped it off the table, answering, “Gloansy, you fatherless prick,” rising and wandering away down the narrow hall.
    Almost nothing had changed on the first two floors in the three years since Jem’s mother’s passing. They were sitting now in the first-floor back parlor, directly below Jem’s game room. A maple chair-rail border ran between velvety milk-white parchment wallpaper stained nicotine yellow and scuffed white wood. The only new addition was an empty walker sticky with old juice, and the padded plastic high chair with the nineteen-month-old girl strapped into it.
    Shyne gripped a gnawed graham cracker in one hand, the pink ribbon of a sagging Mylar heart balloon in the other. Despite the name and its inventive spelling, Shyne was a white child, an alabaster doll with fine, threadlike copper hair and sad, small, Coughlin-white eyes. She looked nothing at all like Doug, eliminating any sliver of doubt remaining in anyone’s mind—even his own—as to Krista’s paternity claim.
    Shyne chewed on her cookie and stared across the table at him. The littlegirl was like a clock running slow. At a glance, you might not notice that anything was off, but spend any amount of time with her and you’d see she wasn’t ticking with the rest of the world. The few times Doug had brought this up with Jem, Jem always countered with some pap he had heard on television, about children developing at different paces. And he could never bring it up with Krista, who was always reading him for signs that he was ready again to care.
    Alone with him now, Krista shook out her ash-blond hair and sat back from the table, looking small and tired in the old armless chair. “I don’t ask him to do that.”
    Doug watched the perfectly still, half-inflated red balloon, wanting the year-and-a-half-old to bounce it, something. “Do what?”
    “Leave us alone together like this. It’s fucked-up, his pushing. Sometimes I swear he wants it more than I do. Like it’s you and his friendship he wants to save.”
    “Where are you getting all this?”
    She shrugged as though it were obvious. “You don’t come around. I mean, he’s an asshole, but you guys are like brothers.” She combed up her hair with her fingers, lifting it high off her ears, then letting it fall. “Or maybe it’s me. Like I’m so radioactive now you can’t come around.”
    Doug sat back and sighed.
    “It’s you who’s radioactive,” she said. “Your X-rays got inside me young, altered me permanently.” She picked at a waffled, clover-shaped place mat, the old food dried into it. “You came home late from your meeting last night.”
    “Jesus,” he said. “That fucking glass rattling in the door.”
    Jem blew back into the room. “Gloaner’s in,” he said, dropping down in front of Shyne and plucking at her balloon string, trying to grab her attention. She gazed up at the sagging, slow-drifting heart.