The Evil That Men Do by Dave White

them. After all, he hadn’t.
    He sat on the edge of an easy chair staring at the beer she gave him, still thinking of running. Probably not. And that meant people were going to die.
    Susan sat across from him in a rocking chair, next to the landline phone. She rocked back and forth, but it didn’t look like the movement relaxed her. She had her arms crossed in front of her, and she stared at the phone.
    “How do I deal with this, Jackson? He could be dead.”
    “You don’t know that. If these people who took him want something, then he’s not dead.”
    “I’ll bet you weren’t this calm when you were waiting to hear about Jeanne.”
    It was a low blow, and Donne felt a chill run through his body. Sitting back in the chair, he said, “Jeanne was sudden. I didn’t have to wait. I was with her father when the phone rang.”
    “Jackson,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up. But Jeanne is the core of everything with you. And you lost her. And I need to know how it felt.”
    Susan was torturing herself, sitting here and thinking about Franklin being dead. She wanted to know what was going to come, how it would feel, and he couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to tell her.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Jeanne wasn’t everything I thought she was.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “God, if Franklin’s… Is that why you left us, Jackson? Why we didn’t speak after Jeanne died?”
    This definitely wasn’t the time to have a conversation about Jeanne. His fingers tingled at the thought of continuing. But he spoke anyway.
    “I couldn’t talk to anyone.”
    “So you threw away your family?”
    “I threw away everyone, Susan. I don’t talk to her parents anymore. Not even after Jeanne died. All I did was get drunk. I’m lucky I didn’t fall back into coke.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t want anyone to see me like I was, I guess.”
    “I don’t think that’s it at all,” Susan said. “I think you were afraid of what could happen if you got too close to anyone else. You isolated yourself because you couldn’t afford to get hurt again.”
    “That’s not—”
    “Yes. It is, Jackson.”
    He didn’t speak. Susan was no longer staring at the phone; her eyes bored through Donne instead. At least, for the moment, her mind was off Franklin.
    “Look at the people you’ve helped since she died. That’s right, I still followed you. You were in the papers. That guy who lost his wife in 9/11. That woman who came all the way here from Fresno. People who isolated themselves as well. No ties to the world. That’s what you want.”
    He couldn’t change her mind. Keeping his mouth shut was the only option. Sit there and take it, just like when he was a kid.
    “You’re like Dad, you know that? Things get tough and you run off. If you weren’t in the fucking papers, we wouldn’t even know you were alive.”
    “I’m sorry, Susan.”
    “Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “Apologize to Mom. The one who might never hear you tell her you love her again. Why do you really think I ‘hired’ you? I don’t want to know about the past. Or at least I didn’t before this week. I just wanted to get you back into the family, before it was too late.”
    He drank his beer.
    “It’s like Uncle George always used to say at Thanksgiving. Do you remember? Family is the most important thing. And for God’s sake, our family needs you now.”
    A single tear fell from her right eye. He could only imagine how much she must have cried in the past few days.
    They jumped when the silence was broken by the phone ringing.
     
     
    The funny thing about kids, Delshawn thought, was that they couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Even his own kid, Damon, fucking twelve years old and every day he’d say “snitches get stitches,” a phrase warning that anyone talking to the police would be jumped. But when something really
gangsta
happened, that kid would give you up