The Guardian Read Online Free Page B

Let’s get going.”
     
    The three of them began making calls at 7:30A.M.
    Ross wandered about the house as they did. Five years of being inside prison had left him feeling clumsy and out of place with even normal business practices. Greg was in control now, and approaching the sale of the land as logically as could be expected under the circumstances.
    Ross hesitated outside Greg and Beth’s bedroom, then went in.
    Sure enough, he found his father’s gun along with the cleaning kit and bullets on the top shelf of Greg’s bedroom closet. Right where their father had kept it.
    Ross felt a hand squeeze his heart, just taking the thing out of the box. His parole officer, Bernise Liotta, and the judge would be myopic about it. Ex-con with a gun, that’s a violation, don’t tell me about your niece, don’t tell me how hard it is to sell real estate in one day, next case file, please.
    Ross took the revolver up to the attic and pulled up a chair to a rickety table and started cleaning the thing. It was an old Smith & Wesson .38 with a black handle grip. The gun hadn’t been oiled in a long time. Ross wondered if it would blow up in his hand.
    To his knowledge, the gun had never been fired. His father had just thought a man needed a gun in his house. Or more likely, he had thought that was how a man should think.
     
    It had been the hardest lesson of Ross’s life to accept that his father was a weak man. But he’d done it one afternoon not long after his thirteenth birthday, when his father had cracked him across the face for flushing a vial of cocaine down the toilet.
    Greg hadn’t wanted to hear it. “Shut up,” he’d said. “Goddamn it, Ross, he’s got a problem. He misses Mom. You’re too young to understand.”
    “Brody is an addict,” Ross had said.
    Greg had shoved him into the bedroom. “Don’t call him by his name. He’s Dad to you and me.”
    Ross hadn’t pushed his brother back, even though he was already faster and almost as strong. After all, Greg was older. Greg remembered better days. He would talk about how much fun it had all been when their mother was alive, going to concerts, traveling the country in an old Volkswagen van. That they had been lucky to have parents who weren’t boring.
    She’d died in a car crash when Ross had been eight, and Greg, ten. Their father had been driving.
    Ross remembered the days before only vaguely, and that had troubled him a lot at first. He remembered his mother as warm, and her hair blond. That she smelled good, and held him and Greg easily, and she kept things OK even when their dad was tense and angry. That she’d call impromptu picnics, just her and the two boys, up overlooking the cove. She’d make light of their father’s “grumpiness.”
    Ross shared his father’s dark hair and regular features. Greg had their mother’s coloring, high cheekbones, and fair skin.
    There had been a time when Ross had hung on his father’s every word, a time when he’d swelled with pride when people said he looked just like his father. Maybe it was that earlier bond that let Ross see even more clearly what his father had become—a man who couldn’t leave the house without taking something before going off to work. Pills, sometimes. Coke, if he could get it. Something to make him preen, check his mustache in the mirror, smooth his long hair. Apparently oblivious to the fact that alcohol had bloated his features.
    For years, he had had a series of declining jobs after he lost his antique store in Marblehead. Nothing was ever his fault. Someone was always out to screw him. He always had a plan to get them first, but the plan inevitably backfired and Ross and Greg would come home to his petty rage. He had acquired hundreds of blues records, and when he was in a good mood, he’d pull Ross and Greg in to listen while he held forth on one musician after another … and then become furious, down to smashing the record itself, if he didn’t get the reaction from his