Last Night I Sang to the Monster Read Online Free Page A

normal. You think I don’t know that? Sometimes, I would sit next to her and ask her if she needed anything and she would look at me like I was some kind of demon and she would just slap me. The first time she did that I went to my room and cried. I was a lot younger then. But after a while I sort of expected it. One time, she really went crazy and wouldn’t stop slapping me. And then she cried and cried and I felt really bad for her. I knew that she didn’t mean it. But the whole situation didn’t make me want to come too close. And then there was that conversation about touching that Ijust couldn’t get out of my mind.
    But there were good days too, days when she would get up early and make breakfast and clean and cook the most amazing meals for dinner. But the last time we had a dinner together, it didn’t work out too well. She’d spent all afternoon making homemade ravioli. “I wanted to be Italian. Instead, I was just a boring girl from Ohio.” My mom was a lot of things. But she wasn’t boring. Boring would have been really great.
    So that night, we were enjoying her ravioli and everything was going really good. My dad was making jokes, trying to make my mom laugh, and my mom, she was smiling. God, she could smile. And Dad wasn’t too drunk and, you know, I was starting to feel a little relaxed. I’m not a relaxed kind of guy. I’m all tied up in knots. You know, around here they call that anxiety. And, well, I’m on some meds for that. Look, I think God wrote anxious on my heart.
    But that night, I was starting to feel chilled. It all fell apart when my brother Santiago came home, stoned out of his mind. He was seriously crazed. He looked at all of us and yelled, “Typical. No one fucking invited me.” I mean, the guy lived there. He was always invited.
    My brother really tore me up. He looked right at my mom and said, “It’s about fucking time you cooked.” He spit on her plate and then started in on my dad, throwing cuss words around like confetti. His words were flying all over the room. He grabbed my dad’s plate and threw it across the room and it shattered against the wall.
    And then my mom, she immediately went back to her internal life, to that place where she lived. I just sat there, hoping my brother wouldn’t go after me. But of course he did. “Suckass.” He made this sucking thing with his lips. “You got any money, suckass?”
    He knew I always had a few bucks on me. It was like I was the guy’s ATM machine. I reached into my wallet and pulled out two twenties.
    “That all you got?”
    “Yeah.” I tried to pretend I wasn’t scared.
    He grabbed the money. “Let me see your wallet.” He threw the wallet on the floor and looked at me like I was nothing. “This isn’t over,” he said. “Don’t fucking believe this is over.” He pushed me against the wall andI could smell his breath. It smelled like he’d eaten a dead dog. God, my heart was beating so fast that I thought it was going to fly out of my chest. He looked at me with that look of his, that look that said I was nothing, that look that said I wasn’t even worth hating.
    He left me standing there. I felt stupid and naked even though I was wearing clothes.
    I heard the door slam and I jumped. Man, I was a knot of nerves.
    My mom got up from where she was sitting and left the room. I got up from my chair and cleaned up the mess. My dad just sat there and poured himself another glass of wine. I served him another plate of my mom’s ravioli and we sat there and finished eating.
    He didn’t say a word. I didn’t either. It was like Santiago stole our mouths and all the words that were in them.
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    I always wanted to have Santiago’s name. We were both named after our grandfathers. Santiago was named after my dad’s father. And I was named after my mom’s father. My dad never liked the idea of me being named Zachariah. Zachariah? What kind of name was that for a guy whose last name was Gonzalez and who lived in