Read Online The Wolves of Fairmount Park by Dennis Tafoya - Free Book Online

say,
let’s just take him out to Fernwood and put him in the ground, you and me, and leave the rest of them to go sit at the funeral home and talk to each other,
which was what they were there to do anyway. He remembered his old man stretched out at Donahoe’s, couldn’t stop staring at his father’s sunken, waxy cheeks while his aunts chatted away with cousins they’d hadn’t seen in a year and he didn’t know what any of it was for.
    He heard Francine stand up in a rustle of clothes and listened to the hollow clacking of her heels on the stairs going down and he realized he wasn’t nearly ready. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his tie crumpled in his fist and suddenly came to himself and looked down at it, the gray silk crushed in his hand. One shoe off and one on. He bent down and fixed his shoes, stood up and left the tie and went for another one, nearly identical to the first. He stood and looked at his side of the closet, hung with more than a dozen suits, a cashmere coat he’d bought six months ago and never worn. Business was good; the money rolled in. Francine had wanted to send George Jr. to a private school in Newtown, but George Sr. had said no. St. Vincent’s was where he’d gone, it was good enough for his son.
    He went to stand at the mirror and looked at his own hard face and broad shoulders and narrow eyes. He dropped his tie again and went quick into the bedroom and got a picture of the three of them that sat on Francine’s dresser. He went back into the closet and stood still in front of the mirror, holding the picture up and scrutinizing George Jr.’s face and then peering over the picture at his own reflection.
    The kid had one of those unformed teenage faces that made his father nervous. There was something so tentative about the kid, the way he walked and talked and sat on the corners of seats, his body bent toward the door and escape. It provoked George Sr., that way of being.
Sit still,
he’d wanted to say, as the kid jiggled his foot,
sit up and be here. Be a man,
that was what he’d finally say, when the kid would come to him with some fucked-up concern that he couldn’t understand. George Jr. was always trying to explain some subtle problem about the way other kids looked at him or expected him to act that he didn’t feel, and it bothered George Sr. to think his kid wasn’t popular or good at anything physical and it made him nearly insane that somehow the boy thought his father wanted to know or could help, as if they were allies, when it was all George Sr. could do to keep from smacking the kid.
    What he’d wanted, when he was honest, was a kid like Michael Donovan. George Sr. would sit in the stands at the hockey games, his own son nowhere in sight, off somewhere with that crowd that wore pale makeup and black lipstick, which at least George Jr. had enough sense to keep off his face. Michael would come off the ice and high-five his father and grab one of the other kids and bang on his helmet, his face open and good-natured and comfortable with being the kid everyone liked. The kid they looked to.
    What were they doing together on that street, in front of that house? Was it some game, some taunt to his narrow-shouldered artsy son to be somewhere dangerous? Was it finally George Jr. trying to be in with the cool kids, and buying dope from a boarded-up crack house was what the cool kids were into?He’d smoked dope when he was their age, everyone he knew had smoked dope except some of the Catholic girls, and some did pills, but mostly they’d all drunk beer, which he couldn’t see George Jr. doing.
    Now he held the picture up, tilting it one way and then another. He searched his son’s face, traced the boy’s slim hand where it lay across his chest, looking for himself. There was Francine’s aquiline nose, a fullness in the lips that might have been from his mother, but where was he? Where