The Neighbors Read Online Free Page B

happened,
still
didn’t know how it had all fallen apart, but before he knew it, his mom would plop him on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, flip on the TV, and Andrew would spend movie nights alone.
    Most mornings started out like all the rest, with his mom whipping up a batch of her specialty: apple pancakes with whipped sour cream. His dad had a job at a potato processing plant just a few miles shy of town. Every morning, after Rick finished his pancakes and downed his OJ, he’d ruffle Drew’s hair as he passed the couch, and he’d leave for work without so much as a good-bye. Every morning, as soon as Drew heard his boots on the front steps, he would spring from the sofa and rush to the window to watch his dad pull the old Chevy out of the driveway. Back then, he wanted to be just like his pop—to work at a big factory and drive a cool truck. From his six-year-old kid perspective, those were the only two things you needed to be a man.
    But the morning Andrew’s father left for good, things were different. It was summertime, so he was still in his Transformerpajamas, watching cartoons on basic cable. There were no pancakes, no conversation between his mom and pop. When Drew asked his father about the old gym bag tossed over his shoulder, Rick had pulled him into a tight hug, ruffled his hair just like every other morning, and told him, “See you later, champ.” But rather than climbing into the Chevy, his dad climbed into someone else’s truck instead. He was gone before Drew’s mom stepped out of the kitchen to check on him.
    “Get away from the window; turn on the TV,” she told him. “
Scooby-Doo
is on.”
    “OK, Mom,” Drew replied, squeaky-voiced, but he lingered at the window for longer than usual. Julie crossed the room, pulling the curtain closed on the still-parked Chevy just beyond the glass.
    “How about we fill up your pool today?” she suggested, and that mysterious truck melted from Andrew’s mind. Visions of sitting in his blue plastic pool blinded him with youthful bliss, and he raced up the stairs to his room to fish out his miniature Speedos and inflatable shark.
    It was only when Drew found himself standing stark naked in his bedroom, trying to get a scrawny leg through the hole in his swim trunks, that he wondered whether he should have told her about the strange truck his dad had climbed into. But if he told her about the truck, he’d have to tell her about the lady driving it, and that would ruin his day in the pool as quick as a tornado could ruin a Kansas town.
    After that, the house decayed into a shadow of its former self. The whitewashed clapboards faded and peeled. The roof was ravaged by decades of wind, and the missing shingles never got replaced, because, his increasingly listless mother reasoned, the next storm would blow them right back off.
    All that was left of Drew’s father was Rick’s pickup and his mother’s sense of betrayal—betrayal that had festered into something that Andrew could no longer handle. She wouldn’t set footoutside her home: not to go to the grocery store, not to check the mail a few steps from the front porch stairs. Years before, she sometimes forced herself to walk along the wraparound porch and sit in her daddy’s swing, but she could no longer even manage that. A few steps outside sent her into a panic, sure that the doors would lock and she’d never be able to get inside again. Andrew had been nine the first time he went to the grocery store alone, a shopping list stuffed into one pocket, a fistful of dollars stuffed into the other. He rode his bike more than three miles in a single direction in the blazing August sun, only to realize, far too late, that he had no way of getting those groceries back home. With plastic shopping bags heavy on his handlebars, he walked his bike all the way back to Cedar Street. When he finally arrived, the half gallon of milk had gone warm.
    By the time Drew turned twelve, he found himself paying bills out