Tell Me One Thing Read Online Free

gave him, love? Dead and buried and she’s still defending him. At the expense of the truth … at the expense of her children
.
    Jamie scoops up the contents of the drawer and leaves the room; his mother’s body stretched out on the bed, doesn’t move.
    Outside, he flings the pajamas on top of all the other clothes in his car trunk, starts to slam the lid closed, and then—an inspiration. He stops. Slowly now, with the calm that deeply embedded anger can bring, Jamie grabs one of his father’s very expensive suit jackets and holds it up.
    “Dead man’s clothes!” he yells. “Get your dead man’s clothes!”
    One of the nephews, kicking a soccer ball back and forth on the front lawn, hears him and comes up the driveway.
    “Hey, what’s going on, Uncle Jamie?”
    Jamie throws the jacket at him. “Take it,” Jamie says, “and a shirt to go with it.” He grabs one at random and tosses it also. “How ’bout a tie, or two—all silk, looks good with the shirt.”
    He shoves the ties into his nephew’s arms. “Cool” is all the teenager says, but then there are more nephews there, grabbing clothes from the open trunk. Sweaters are pulled over heads, a silk dressing gown is grabbed by one of his nieces, shoes are slipped onto feet. And through it all, Jamie is shouting, “Dead man’s clothes, come and get ’em!”
    The back door opens and some of his brothers and sisters are there. Drew is outraged but Moira is laughing and grabs something, anything now, it doesn’t matter, putting it on, parading down the driveway. Bits and pieces of Hugh Sr. thrown around from child to child, cousin to cousin, put on, exchanged, traded with another cousin, scraps of Hugh’s dignity walking across the front lawn. Hugh Jr. wants the hats—fine, gray fedoras that heclaims for his own. The pajamas go, armfuls of them, and even his father’s underwear is grabbed by someone.
    “Put ’em on, take ’em off. Trade ’em. Sell ’em. Whatever you want, but get ’em now—your dead man’s clothes!” Jamie yells.
    And it’s then that he looks up and sees his mother standing in the open kitchen doorway, ashen, horrified at the blasphemy of what he’s doing. Her eyes hold his and Jamie doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away. There is no guilt in him. He wants her to know that he’s doing this with pleasure, with gusto, with revenge. “Get your dead man’s clothes!”

Irish Twins
              VERY EARLY ON A SUNDAY MORNING, BEFORE the sun is even up, on the one-year anniversary of their father’s death, Ellen O’Connor arrives on her brother’s doorstep and rings the bell. Despite having lived in San Diego for the past thirteen years, Jamie O’Connor can think of no one he would be glad to see at 5:17 a.m. He assumes someone’s made a mistake, turns over, and goes back to sleep.
    Standing in front of the third door in an identical line of weathered gray doors of the Casa Nuevo Villa, condo units that didn’t even look “nuevo” when they were built in the eighties, Ellen checks her cell phone for Jamie’s address. She’s exhausted; maybe she’s made a mistake. Having flown all night from Spain, where she has exiled herself for the past seven years, Ellen’s not sure she’s at the right unit. She is. She rings the bell again.
    Jaime groans in his bed.
It’s Sunday
, he wants to shout.
Can’t they
—an undefined, amorphous “they” that encompasses almost the whole world
—leave me alone?!
Then he hears “Jamie?” and the familiarity of the voice pulls him out of bed.
    From his second-floor bedroom window he can look down on his front doorstep, and there she is, his sister Ellen, standing at the door, one small duffel bag in hand.
Well, at least she’s alive
is his first thought. The last time he saw her he wouldn’t have made a bet on that possibility.
    He opens the window, sticks his head out, “Ellen,” and she steps back so she can see him and then gives him that smile he remembers so well