Read Online Turn Signal by Howard Owen - Free Book Online Page B

his wife left him 10 years ago, the day after Raymond, their youngest, graduated from high school.
    â€œIt’s his eyes,” Gina said once. “They’re like little BB’s. And he doesn’t look right at you when he talks.”
    Sandy’s been a homemaker most of her adult life, the only one of them to finish college. Her kids are grown and gone. She could get a job now, but she makes no secret of her desire to never “punch a time-clock again.” She was a sixth-grade teacher for three years after she married, and she hasn’t been back. Every time Jack sees her, she seems out of breath. She’s been sure for 20 years that she has cancer, but so far the doctors have been unable to find it.
    Jack does not have that many fond memories of his childhood, although he thinks that he should. To hear everyone talk about it later, he was spoiled rotten, the apple of everyone’s eye, The Baby.
    He remembers being something of a fifth wheel, a pest to his older siblings and something of a burden to parents who were not young enough to chase him around the yard, playing tag or ball the way they had with the other two. Kenneth and Ellen were still in their early 20s when Mike and Sandy were born.
    It wasn’t until he showed some aptitude at sports that he remembers getting much voluntary attention from his older siblings.
    â€œSo,” Mike says, looking almost at him, “how’d the reunion go? Surprised you could make it up this early.”
    â€œIt was OK. Mostly people I see all the time anyhow. Gerald Prince was there. You remember Jerry Prince?”
    Mike laughs as he flicks an ash into the Coke can next to his lawn chair. They’re on the porch because Sandy won’t let him smoke inside. She’s afraid it might hurt the sale value.
    â€œThe Little Princess? Good God, I hadn’t thought about him in some time. He’s in New York, is that right?”
    They hear a truck start up in the side yard and see Brady roar past, not looking in their direction, peeling a little rubber as he turns left out of the driveway, toward town.
    â€œI told him he ought to be out of here by 2,” Jack says, in way of explaining why his son has not chosen to speak to them.
    Sandy is passing out paper plates, admonishing them to put all the chicken bones and other trash in the white plastic bag she’s attached to the side of the porch table.
    â€œJack,” she says, “how’s the book coming? Are you almost done? I mean, is it finished?”
    He tells her it is finished, and she makes a show at seeming excited by this. At least, Jack think, she tries. Mike told him, a month after he sold his rig, that he thought he’d lost his mind.
    â€œSo, how much … I mean, do you think somebody’ll want to pay you something for it?” Sandy asks.
    â€œDunno,” Jack says, gnawing on a drumstick. “I sure hope so.”
    â€œYou don’t have us in there, do you?” Mike is looking more or less at him. “I’ve heard of people that just totally embarrassed their families by writing shit about them in books.”
    Sandy gives Mike a sharp look. “Jack wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t embarrass us. And don’t talk like that.”
    â€œJust asking.”
    Jack explains to his older brother, again, that it’s a novel, that it’s fiction.
    â€œThat means made up,” he says.
    â€œI know what fiction is,” Mike tells him, glaring out across the yard. “You ain’t talking to an idiot. Hell, I’ve got more education than you do.”
    True. Mike went through two years of junior college.
    Jack asked them to come out here. You don’t know, he told Mike, how many more times we’ll be able to be together in the old place. Somebody might buy it next week.
    â€œIf there’s a god,” Mike said, but he and Sandy both were able to free up some time from their busy schedules. For Mike,