Brewster by Mark Slouka Page A

good guy, a friend of mine, but I wasn’t about to go chasing after his ass down to the shore, or sit around on his porch waiting for him to get home, or waste my time trying to figure out his particular deal with his old man. I had my own life. Everybody had their shit. Frank’s sister had disappeared. My mom was going nuts. We didn’t have to go looking for problems.
    W E’D BEEN SITTING on the railing over the East Branch one evening in August when Frank told me about it. How his sister had gotten knocked up, then refused to tell them who the father was. How his parents had thrown her out of the house, thinking to scare some sense into her, only to find out she’d had money saved and had gotten on a bus for God knows where. It had been a month and they hadn’t heard a thing. I had no idea how fucked up it was in his house right now. Nobody talked about it.
    “Sounds familiar,” I said.
    “Serious.”
    “Me, too.”
    He broke off a piece of stick and threw it in the current. “It’s like, I don’t know—I don’t even know what. Like they took a pair of scissors and just cut her out, you know?” He started working his shoulder in small circles. “My Dad actually went through the house and took down every picture with her in it, which was basically all of ’em. We came home from school and there were all these spaces on the wall. Megan went nuts.”
    “How’s the shoulder doin’?” I said.
    “Good. Should be able to throw tomorrow.”
    I nodded. “So what’d he do with ’em?”
    “I don’t know—stuck ’em in a box, burned ’em, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It’s just I don’t get it, you know? I mean, Jesus is all about forgiveness, right?”
    “Sure, I guess.”
    “I mean, I know you’re not into it and all, but that’s what Jesus is all about. I mean, that’s the whole point—forgiveness. He forgave us our sins”—he slapped at a mosquito, then flicked it off his arm with his finger—“so we’re supposed to forgive others. It’s not like he said, you know, ‘Forgive everybody except your own family.’ ”
    “Maybe it’s easier that way.”
    “Easy’s not supposed to be part of it either.”
    I slapped at my face. “Lots of things aren’t supposed to be parts of things—but they are, you know?”
    “Maybe, but then they shouldn’t say they’re not.”
    “Sure.”
    The light was going fast. I watched the current, pulled endlessly from beneath us. A short way down, where it kept bulging over something, the water looked like syrup about to boil.
    “I mean, my folks went to talk to Father Donnelly after—”
    “Who?”
    “Our priest, good guy, known us all our lives—’cause, you know, Mom’s all messed up, Dad’s not talkin’. They want to know what’s the right thing to do, right?”
    “OK.”
    “So he tells ’em”—he slapped himself—“we should probably get outta here. So he tells ’em, basically, to put her behind them, that she’s slipped from the path of righteousness and only she can save her soul and they’ve been blessed with two other children—to concentrate on that. To cast her from their hearts.”
    The mosquitoes were coming in thicker now. It was almost dark. The water had turned to ink.
    “I’m gettin’ eaten up,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    We got off the rail and started walking back to town in the near-dark—there were no lights on Sodom Road.
    “He said that?” I said.
    “I mean, that’s crazy, right?”
    “Crazy’s goin’ around, what can I tell you?”
    “Mom?”
    I shrugged. “So listen to this. I come home from practice last week and nobody’s home, right? It’s around seven—the house is dark. I’m taking off my shoes when I hear this guy’s voice comin’ from upstairs—this fucked-up, high-pitched voice, almost like a kid’s. Scares the crap out of me. I’m halfway up the stairs holding my spikes in my hand when the voice starts goin’ up and there’s this sound like somebody knocking on a