The Mourning After Read Online Free

to avoid an altercation with his mother for being away too long.  How much time does it take to eat a bag  of Chips Ahoy! ? he asks himself.  She knew.  She always knew.
    When he reaches his tree-lined street, the cleaning crew is pulling out of the driveway next door.  They had been there all morning, but Levon was too distracted to notice.  Finally, the jerk who had lived next door since Levon was a toddler had moved out.  If not for his brother’s horrendous death, Levon would have been rejoicing in his much-anticipated departure.  He parked his bike on the side of his house, nearby the wooden planks that fenced their home and kept nuisances like Bruce out.  He peered into the window of the now vacant house.  Bruce was a creep by all definitions of the word.  Three years out of high school and he was still living at home with his parents, making everyone’s life miserable, while ostensibly deciding what to do with his own wasteful life.  If it were up to Levon, he’d suggest an incurable and inoperative injury to his larynx that would prohibit him from talking.  Much that came out of his mouth was either rooted in insult or was so derogatory in nature that Levon avoided him at all costs.  You never wanted to be the overweight kid on the receiving end of the master bully.
    He knows it is not the most appropriate time to indulge in negative thinking, but when he toys with the idea of Bruce switching places with David, it gives him a gratifying sense of pleasure.  If only David’s absence meant that he had moved out of the house and on to college, something less permanent, less forever.  And Bruce, who will probably never decide the direction and course of his lopsided life, instead, will infiltrate a new neighborhood while the rest of us are left in his wake, scratching our heads in disbelief that the world can be so unfair.
    “You’re back,” his mother says, when he opens the door to the house.  She cannot prevent herself from glancing at her watch.  The door closes behind them; she grabs the bag of cornstarch, and before she asks, he answers, “Sally’s dropping off the rest later.  I couldn’t carry the box on my bike.”
    It is hard for Levon to watch his mother wince. He hears the chatter coming through the door, the gathering of lingering mourners and realizes he has to go to the bathroom.  Racing through the house, he misses the moving trucks and the black Volvo station wagon that reach his block.  As he lifts the toilet seat, his gaze turns upward toward the window.  He can hear the trucks as they halt in front of the house, their screeching brakes sounding more like whistling steam engines.  Zipping his pants and washing his hands, he takes the few steps to the window and stands on his tiptoes to see his new neighbors.  At the same time, bellowing voices emerge from the hallway outside the bathroom.  The muffled sounds beckon him to turn toward the door and listen.
    He recognizes the delicate timbre of his father’s tone against the loud, hurling accusations of his mother.  He can’t make out what they are saying, nor does he try.  If he had his journal with him, he would be able to cite similar exchanges, even dictate the exchange himself.  Lowering himself to the floor, he turns and positions himself backside against the door.  An interruption from their offensive, culpable son would not bode well.  Levon stares at his watch instead.
    It wasn’t always this way.
    Levon remembered when it was just the two of them, David and him.  To his four-year-old mind, his family seemed really happy.  Then Chloe came along, and life was divided into before and after.  It was impossible to blame Chloe; he loved her madly, though her appearance diffused the balance of a family’s once ordinary veneer.  Levon’s earlier memories were correlated with the bottle of Shalimar that rested on his mother’s vanity.  Whenever his parents would go out for dinner, his mom splashed herself