Lamentation Read Online Free Page A

touched but always knew were there. Until they weren’t. My brother had stopped by under the pretense of wanting to see his nephew and, somehow, he’d sniffed them out, snatched them from under our noses. Because if there was an unattended narcotic within a fifty-mile radius, Chris could zero in on that shit like a ’roided-up bloodhound.
    Instead of calling out my brother like I should have, I abandoned Jenny in her accusation. Chris swore on our parents’ life that he hadn’t taken the pills, and, even though I knew he was lying, I backed him up anyway. That fight was about more than the pills. That night Jenny had needed me to take a side. And I did. I just picked the wrong one.
    The light, a single, uncovered bulb, blazed in the narrow well leading upstairs. Creaking wood stretched and groaned, the hollow, winding winds rattling the whole decrepit building.
    I unlocked the front door, which led into my tiny kitchen, Chris right on my heels, before he pushed past me like it was somehow his apartment too. I threw my keys on the table, next to the stack of red-letter bills I’d been ignoring.
    “Got any beer?” Chris asked, dropping his backpack that reeked of bum shit on the same kitchen table where I ate.
    I walked by him into the TV room. “Check the fridge.” I flicked on the television, searching for the Bruins game.
    My nameless cat scratched on the porch. I didn’t even know how it became
my
cat. Belonged to the neighbors, I think, but it kept coming around. So I pet it, fed it. I’d wake in the middle of the night and somehow the fat thing would’ve scaled the drainpipe and I’d find her stuck on my second-floor landing, crying to be let in. This is what you get for being a nice guy. One day, I look out and the neighbors are gone, house boarded up with a “For Sale” sign, and now I’m stuck with the damn thing. That was over a year ago. Never got around to naming it. I’m nottoo philosophical a guy, don’t like to get too heavy, but it was hard not to draw a correlation. I mean, I couldn’t even name the fucking cat I’d been feeding and taking care of for over a year because I didn’t want to get too attached.
    My brother stood in the doorway, rail-thin arms up in a
T
over the frame, hanging there like a crucified, junkie Jesus. “No beer in the fridge, little brother.”
    “Then I’m fucking out, Chris.”
    The Bruins were down three with four minutes left, the Devils on a power play. I switched it off and dropped in the chair and pulled my fingers through my hair.
    “Got any money?” he asked. “I’ll run downstairs and grab us some.”
    You hand my brother money, and that’s the last you’ll see of him. He’d trade the warmth of a bed indoors for the chance to get high, every time.
    Chris dropped from the frame and slinked over to the couch, wiry body shiftless as an underfed snake in a windblown field. He snared my cigarettes from the table, flicking a match and inhaling deeply, sinking into the sofa, whose stuffed cushions threatened to devour him.
    “You going to tell me what that shit was about tonight?” I asked.
    Chris gazed over expressionless, like he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
    “Tonight. At the station. Where I was dragged down after a long day of work.”
    Chris dismissively waved a hand.
    “Turley said you’ve been getting in fights—making threats. What the hell is wrong with you?”
    “Fuck Rob Turley. I remember catching that tub of lard huffing paint thinner behind the Community Center. Now he wants to act like a big dick-swinging cop.”
    I swiped the Marlboro Lights off the arm of the couch. “I think there’s some beer under the sink. Grab me one too.”
    My brother brushed the wisps of peroxide blond back into that cockamamie homemade haircut and bounced up gleefully.
    “Stick the rest in the fridge,” I called out.
    I felt the money Tom had given me in my pocket. I ran through the math in my head. The envelope, plus what I’d