Family Man Read Online Free

Rose for my shift. I owed her that, and a whole lot more.
    My dad died shortly after my second birthday. He was shot during what should have been a routine traffic stop. I didn’t even have a memory of him to console me. So many times, I’d pored over the photos of us at our old house in Oak Park, my dad pushing me on a baby swing, or laughing while I stood wearing his badge, his police cap hanging down over my eyes. I’d tried to convince myself that I remembered him, but I was old enough now to admit the truth. He was nothing more than a shadow in my mind where happiness should have been.
    Two years after his death, we’d come to live with his parents. I hadn’t understood why. Back then, I’d loved Gram’s narrow brownstone on Loomis: my grandfather had still been alive, and I’d come home from school to see him fussing with our tiny spec of yard in an eternal battle with the shade trees before his shift at the plant, or touching up the paint on the rail. The neighborhood had been full of kids, many of them Fierros, and our house was warm with laughter and love.
    Now our section of the block was more than a little rundown, and Gram’s brownstone wasn’t helping anything. Even if any of us had time to touch up the paint on the railing, we wouldn’t waste money on it. The steps had finally become so rickety we’d had to deal with them, but that had amounted to me clumsily nailing thicker boards over the top of the broken ones and hoping no inspector came by to tell me I was breaking city code. The yard was a weedy, barren mess. The neighborhood mostly housed college students. There were no packs of kids running the streets. No kickball games. No Kick the Can. And as for our house—well, I loved my Gram and my mom, but the laughter had stopped long ago.
    “Gram,” I called when I came in the front door. “I’m home. Did you need me to go to the store for anything before I go to work?”
    It wasn’t Gram who answered though. It was my mom’s voice that drifted in from the kitchen.
    “I already went to the store. I’m making your favorite: goulash.”
    Goulash hadn’t been my favorite since I’d hit puberty and learned to distinguish Chef Boyardee from dog food. “I won’t be here for dinner. I have to work tonight.”
    My mom came out of the kitchen with her paring knife still clutched in her right hand. She wore jeans and T-shirt, and she even had on a bit of makeup. She looked better than she had in a long time, though she did have a needy look about her that set off the old alarm bells. “But, honey, I was all set to make you dinner then take you to a movie.”
    Why exactly she’d decided out of the blue to try to turn the evening into a mother/son date was anyone’s guess. “I can’t. Not tonight.”
    “But, Trey—”
    “I have to work, Ma. What do you want me to do? Call in sick?”
    Even suggesting such a thing was a mistake. “You could. Then we could go—”
    “I was kidding.”
    Her smile disappeared. Her shoulders drooped. She sighed, a big dramatic gesture full of self-pity, because although it was me working two jobs while trying to go to school, in her mind she was the one who was really being inconvenienced. “I get so lonely. You’re never here, and Gram isn’t much company. I don’t know anybody—”
    “We’ve lived here for more than twenty years. You know everybody.”
    “But I don’t have any friends.”
    We’d been over this, more times than I could count. They say misery loves company, but the truth is, misery gets lonely pretty damn fast. “Mom, I don’t have time for this right now.”
    “You never have time. You work too hard. You should be home—”
    I turned away, heading up the stairs to change into my work clothes. What could I say to her? Yes, I was young. Yes, life was unfair. I would have loved to be one of the college boys who could show up to a few classes and spend the rest of my time getting high. But the fact of the matter was, somebody had to