First You Try Everything Read Online Free Page B

presence had rendered the checkers in an impersonal
grocery store as momentarily intimate as the mom-and-pop shop people two blocks
down.
    Evvie’s loyalty to her brother was something he’d
fallen in love with. He’d absorbed all her stories about Cedric, the ones she’d
told when the two of them were holed up in that first tiny third-floor apartment
where the fire escape led to the back entrance of a bar where Evvie’s old band
had played when she was twenty. Maybe he would drive by that old place later
today, look up at the old white door, or even climb those steps and peer in at
the kitchen. Maybe whatever devastating love had been born there could be felt
like a reviving tonic. He needed some kind of tonic badly.
    Ben watched Cedric walk through the glass doors and
disappear for another day. Sometimes Cedric was his favorite person in the
world. He did not get involved with others but regarded them from a natural
distance made of his sincere inability to comprehend what all the fuss was
about. Though he was highly intelligent, he possessed the gift of simplicity
that seemed rooted in a radical innocence.
    Sometimes Ben wished this innocence was something
he could contract himself. To walk through the world that way seemed a worthy,
if unachievable, goal. Other days Ben thought of Cedric as a compulsive and
self-absorbed filthy squatter, teetering on the edge of eviction, oblivious to
the needs of others. He’d said he needed a place to stay, and they’d said sure,
but that was five years ago. He’d slowly trashed their attic. “What does it
matter?” Evvie said. “Like we ever go up there.” But Ben felt the chaos over his
head like something that itched. “If someone else had made that mess, you’d hate
it,” he told Evvie. “Maybe,” she’d admitted. On certain days, the relationship
between Evvie and Cedric struck Ben as pathological. She loved his dependence.
He loved the routines he’d developed, the crappy little nest he’d made in the
attic, the way she made him buttered muffins and gave him money she didn’t have,
and called him Cedrico. Lately every time she called
him Cedrico , Ben wanted to say, His name is Cedric.
    The attic was probably infested. Evvie said it was
a good sign if spiders and mice wanted to hunker down with you. It meant you
weren’t too toxic yet. She actually whispered, when she found webs in their
cabinets, “Spiders, you’re good. You’re very good.” She refused to kill the
moths that overtook their kitchen twice a year. She didn’t mind kitchen moths.
“They’re so harmless.” She’d try to cup the moths in her hands and set them
free, but after a few egg-hatchings, the kitchen would fill up with great
swarming clouds of the white, winged creatures (a neighbor had come in one
night, unexpectedly, and seen Evvie eating a plate of noodles as if in blissful
ignorance of what the neighbor told Ben “had to be a good hundred of the little
bastards”). Finally Ben won the battle of the moths, setting up little cardboard
tents that lured them in with sticky black stripes of pheromones that promised
sex to the males and instead trapped them in place, their wings protesting until
they died. “Imagine that,” Evvie said. One of Ben’s darkest thoughts regarding
Evvie was that she was a pheromone trap. That he’d entered the trap fifteen
years ago and some part of him had slowly died because of it.
    T his
morning, out of nowhere, Evvie had given him one of her old hugs, lifting him
off his feet though he was fifty pounds heavier than she was, and four inches
taller. She’d done that a lot when they were first married, proud of her
strength, which seemed to issue forth from a sporadic mania. Now she was doing
it again. After years of not doing it. Couldn’t she sense that he wasn’t in the
mood?
    He’d broken free.
    He’d turned away,