First You Try Everything Read Online Free Page A

stand on corners and wait for buses, and just below
the surface of their complaints about the brutal cold, they learn to covet their
weather, and feel superior to people in sunnier, sillier climates.
    Ben was tired of all that. Not Evvie. She loved
Pittsburgh the way the natives did. This after years of wanting out. If Ben
complained about the weather, Evvie liked to remind him that an architecture
critic from the New Yorker named Pittsburgh, Saint
Petersburg, and Paris the three most beautiful cities in the world.
    But he’d grown up in Erie, and these days felt
tired of Western Pennsylvania, architecture and all.
    This morning Ben was grateful for Cedric’s sleepy
silence in the car. His brother-in-law was almost always quiet in a car, as long
as there was sports talk on the radio. The talk show host rattled on about the
coming Steelers game. The low sky looked like a bruise, and Ben drove fast
against the feeling that nothing was right.
    â€œI’m not looking forward to this game,” Cedric
mumbled when a commercial came on.
    â€œBaltimore’s overrated,” Ben answered.
    â€œI don’t know about that.” Cedric cared so much
about his team he had to take nothing for granted and assume they’d be beaten,
so as not to be crushed by the possible disappointment.
    Ben pulled the car into the lot of the Aspinwall
Giant Eagle.
    â€œThanks, man,” Cedric said, before getting out. He
looked at Ben with his usual mix of innocence and apprehension. “You all right?
You seem a little tense.”
    â€œIt’s my job, I guess.”
    â€œBeing tense is your job?”
    â€œSeems that way.” He gripped the steering wheel,
leaned forward, blew out a stream of air.
    â€œNo real pressure here at the old Giant Eagle. You
would make an acceptable cashier. Or you could choose to be a low-rung loser and
unload trucks in the back with me.”
    â€œI just might, someday.”
    Cedric nodded his encouragement, smiled, and got
out of the car. Ben watched his brother-in-law head across the parking lot.
Cedric had dropped out of college, where he’d been studying electrical
engineering, had chosen to work at the Giant Vulture (Evvie’s nickname for the
supermarket megastore) because it was low pressure, involved little interaction
with a boss or customers, and because, according to Evvie, he had depended on
such stores since his childhood in Philadelphia. (Evvie had told Ben so many
vivid stories about Cedric as a child that sometimes it seemed he’d been there
as witness, an invisible sibling who’d seen Cedric walking on his toes toward
Pantry Pride, where apparently every day for years he’d bought red licorice and
bottles of iced tea.) Those shopping ventures had been distractions from home
life (where nothing was predictable) and school life (where peers considered him
the freak to torment). A popular girl had once stuck a dead rodent in his Batman
lunch box, for instance. When he was ten, a teacher kept him after class and
told him he would never amount to anything if he didn’t find a way to stop being so weird . Did he think it was “cool” to be weird ? the teacher had said. Was he looking for
attention? Did he practice being weird at home? No doubt Cedric had stared at
her, unblinking, able to see her ineptitude but too stunned to name it or know
it was cruel. (Ben and Evvie both wished they could walk back into the past and
deck the woman.) And then, when Cedric was thirteen, he’d been given a
concussion by a boy in gym class, the same boy who, the year before, had started
a rumor that Cedric regularly gave the janitor, a portly guy who smoked cigars,
blow jobs.
    And yet, according to Evvie, the Pantry Pride
checkers in those days had greeted Cedric as if he were a celebrity. Ceddy! Where you been? And his presence—something so
golden and pure about Cedric, and he was beautiful too—had unified them.
According to Evvie, his