Tell Me One Thing Read Online Free Page B

brick house in Buffalo, but no one has compared notes. Until now. Ellen has come halfway around the world for just that purpose.
    “What if I wasn’t home?” Jamie says to her as he opens the door wider and ushers her in.
    “Where would you be at five thirty in the morning? You have no life.”
    “How would you know that, Ellen? I haven’t spoken to you in a year.”
    “Jaime, you wear your singleness like a sign.” But Ellen is taking stock of his living situation and not looking at her brother at all. “Holy mother,” she says as she scans the living room/dining room space, “this is goddamn depressing. Could you have decorated a little bit at least? Put a picture on the wall. A bowl of fruit on the table. It’s like nobody lives here.”
    “And I’m happy to see you, too.”
    Ellen drops her small bag on the couch. “Can you make us some coffee? I’ve been flying all night.”
    Jamie moves into the tidy kitchen and Ellen takes one of the two barstools at the breakfast bar so she can watch her brother and talk while he gets the coffeemaker going.
    “You know what today is, don’t you?” She speaks to his back as he grinds the beans, measures the coffee carefully into the machine.
    “Liberation day plus one year.”
    “That’s one way to look at it.” And Ellen takes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, a lighter.
    “Not in here,” Jaime says.
    “When did you get to be such an old lady?” But Ellen puts the pack away.
    Water gurgling now and seeping into the filter, Jamie turns his full attention to his sister. He leans against the counter and studies her. All the girls take after their father, large boned and rangy, with unruly ginger hair and the kind of skin that flushes with temperature changes or emotion. His mother contributed most of her genes to the boys. They all turned out dark like Carrie, with narrow faces, sharp chins, and a slightly haunted look. “I’m Black Irish,” Carrie would always say with a hint of apology.
    “What?” Ellen says now, challenging Jamie’s scrutiny.
    “I thought you were dying the last time I saw you.”
    “Oh, that …” Ellen waves her hand in the air, dismissing his concern with one airy gesture. “Nope. Just a bad patch.”
    Jamie wants to ask her what “a bad patch” means, but doesn’t. “You seem better” is all he says, quietly.
    Ellen shrugs. “Can I at least smoke on your microscopic patio?”
    “If you don’t leave your butts around.”
    “Jesus, Jamie.” But she goes out through the living room’s sliding glass door and makes sure to close it tightly behind her.
    On the front patio she smokes and paces, back and forth, back and forth, as if she’s working off some punishment. Thirty paces without cease. Jamie watches her and waits. He feels something within him stir, something buried under years of living alone. He loves this sister more than the others, more than the brothers who preceded him.
    They were the perfect “Irish twins,” who were treated as a team, a unit. Jamie knows that without Ellen he might not havesurvived at all. She was his protector, his guide, his interpreter of signs and storm warnings. All he could give her in return was his love, and he did. His adoration of Ellen knew no limits. At least until they hit adolescence, they were inseparable.
    Ellen finishes her cigarette, resists the urge to flip the butt into the sparse shrubbery, and watches her brother find two mugs, pour the coffee into them, open the refrigerator, and rummage for milk.
He looks like an old man
leaps into her mind. It’s the constrained movements—precise and miserly. The lack of energy. She shakes herself—this isn’t the Jamie she knew. What’s happened in the seven years she’s been away?
    Jamie was always the angriest of them all and the bravest, taking their father on when everyone else would scatter into rooms with locked doors, waiting out the “Hugh storm” as they called it. Too often Jamie’s anger, his outrage