Halfway House Read Online Free

watch the hours waiting for the attack he knew was coming. Sometimes it happened in the beginning of a visit. Sometimes it happened smack dab in the middle. He remembered once at the zoo throwing peanuts at the blue-faced baboons, when one minute he and his soon-to-be-mommy were laughing, and the next he was flopping along the sidewalk doing the grand mal hustle. The woman couldn’t get him back to the orphanage fast enough. To her he wasn’t a boy, but a broken toy, to be returned and replaced. But Bobby couldn’t be replaced. Bobby couldn’t even be fixed. Epilepsy was permanent.
    “Mind if I join you, Bobby boy?”
    Caught daydreaming as he dug absently at his eggs with a fork, Bobby broke into a smile, stood, and pushed out the chair next to him. “Of c-course,” he stammered.
    Bobby admired Laurie as she sat, catching her in a moment of self-possession. Her long brown hair. The band of freckles across her nose. Her sapphire blue eyes. She reminded him of a young Susan Dey from old reruns of the Partridge Family . She wore a tank-top that showed off her tanned arms. Smallish breasts, but they seemed perfect for her. She caught him watching and smiled. He turned away, his heart ballooning.
    They sat at the first of four cast-iron bistro tables along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant’s entrance. The other tables were filled with neighborhood regulars. Dressed mostly in fleece jackets, shorts, and flip-flops, they were ensconced in the LA Times , reading the cover story about the MS-13 Attacks in Boylston Heights. A chauffeur with her black limo parked down the street had a black and white Harlequin Great Dane hitched to a chair, the leash dangling and almost unnecessary as the immense yet placid animal pretended to sleep, all the while eyeing opportunities to sneak food.
    “Where’s your mind today?” she asked.
    Ensnared by her gaze, he tried not to smile, but couldn’t help it. He wished he’d gotten out more as a kid, as ingloriously unprepared for the dating scene as he was. Luckily, the waitress saved him.
    As Laurie ordered, Bobby allowed himself one more free memory, knowing that he’d need all of himself if he wanted to impress this girl. It was the dog that reminded him of Sister Agnes. She’d been like a mother to him at the home from the day he’d been dropped off as a swaddled infant, through all the hopes and seizures, all the dark nights when he’d cried himself to sleep, even the day he was hit by a bus.
    As a nun, she wasn’t allowed many possessions. A pet was definitely out of the question, but her love of dogs wasn’t to be deterred. She couldn’t own real dogs, so she adopted two-dimensional ones. An entire wall of her office was covered from floor to ceiling with pictures of dogs of all shapes and sizes. These were her dogs and she had a name for each of them, and even better, she gave them to her children—the lost ones of the orphanage. Everyone got to pick out a dog for themselves.
    At first, Bobby thought this the silliest thing he’d ever heard, but the more the others talked about it the more he wanted in. Finally, after spending two hours examining each and every canine on Sister Agnes’s wall, he chose an immense Great Dane who stood cocksure on top of a stage like the Rock and Roll King of dogs. This was his dog. And during the long nights when the other kids whispered and coughed and screamed in their dreams, he imagined playing with his dog, his Great Dane, his dog Elvis.
    “Did you ever have a dog?” he asked.
    “Of course.”
    “What kind?”
    “A Chihuahua. Her name was Salad Bowl.”
    “Salad Bowl?” Bobby snorted. “What the hell kind of name is that for a dog?”
    Laurie grinned. “She was a Teacup Chihuahua. Just about the cutest, tiniest little thing you’d ever seen. My first day home with her, I was showing her off and I put her on the table. Next thing I knew, an hour had passed. I was worried she’d decided to jump down. I thought the height