“Didn’t work out.” As in: that nice boy, my AA buddy Connell, relapsed on both booze and crack, called me all slurry and screwed up, full of blurry suck-ass excuses, so he’s obviously out. The garage apartment is my best option.
“Is there even any heat in that ratty place?”
“Jesus God, Ma. You haven’t even seen the frickin’ –”
“It’s pretty reliable,” Jase says, not even wincing. “It was my brother’s, and Joel likes his comforts.”
“All right. I’ll . . . leave you two boys to – carry on.” She pauses, runs her hand through her hair, showing half an inch of gray roots beneath the red. “Don’t forget to take the stenciled paper Aunt Nancy sent in case you need to write thank-you notes.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Ma. Uh, forgetting, I mean.”
Jase bows his head, smiling, then shoulders the cardboard box.
“What about pillows?” she says. “You can tuck those right under the other arm, can’t you, a big strapping boy like you?”
Christ.
He obediently raises an elbow and she rams two pillows into his armpit.
“I’ll throw all this in the Jetta. Take your time, Tim.”
I scan the room one last time. Tacked to the corkboard over my desk is a sheet of paper with the words THE BOY MOST LIKELY TO scrawled in red marker at the top. One of the few days last fall I remember clearly – hanging with a bunch of my (loser) friends at Ellery out by the boathouse where they stowed the kayaks (and the stoners). We came up with our antidote to those stupid yearbook lists: Most likely to be a millionaire by twenty-five. Most likely to star in her own reality show. Most likely to get an NFL contract. Don’t know why I kept the thing.
I pop the list off the wall, fold it carefully, jam it into my back pocket.
Nan emerges as soon as Jase, who’s been waiting for me in the foyer, opens the creaky front door to head out.
“Tim,” she whispers, cool hand wrapping around my forearm. “Don’t vanish.” As if when I leave our house I’ll evaporate like fog rising off the river.
Maybe I will.
By the time we pull into the Garretts’ driveway, I’ve burned through three cigarettes, hitting up the car lighter for the next before I’ve chucked the last. If I could have smoked all of them at once, I would’ve.
“You should kick those,” Jase says, looking out the window, not pinning me with some accusatory face.
I make to hurl the final butt, then stop myself.
Yeah, toss it next to little Patsy’s Cozy Coupe and four-year-old George’s midget baby blue bike with training wheels. Plus, George thinks I’ve quit.
“Can’t,” I tell him. “Tried. Besides, I’ve already given up drinking, drugs, and sex. Gotta have a few vices or I’d be too perfect.”
Jase snorts. “Sex? Don’t think you have to give that up.” He opens the passenger-side door, starts to slide out.
“The way I did it, I do. Gotta stop messing with any chick with a pulse.”
Now Jase looks uncomfortable. “That was an addiction too?” he asks, half in, half out the door, nudging the pile of old newspapers on the passenger side with the toe of one Converse.
“Not in the sense that I, like, had to have it, or whatever. It was just . . another way to blow stuff off. Numb out.”
He nods like he gets it, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Gotta explain. “I’d get wasted at parties. Hook up with girls I didn’t like or even know. It was never all that great.”
“Guess not” – he slides out completely – “if you’re with someone you don’t even like or know. Might be different if you were sober and actually cared.”
“Yeah, well.” I light up one last cigarette. “Don’t hold your breath.”
“There is,” I say through my teeth, “an owl in the freezer. Can any of you guys explain this to me?”
Three of my younger brothers stare back at me. Blank walls. My younger sister doesn’t look up from texting.
I repeat the question.
“Harry put it there,” Duff says.
“Duff told me to,” Harry says.
George, my youngest brother, cranes his neck. “What kind of owl? Is it dead? Is it white like Hedwig?”
I poke at the rock-solid owl, which is wrapped in a frosty freezer bag. “Very dead. Not white. And someone ate all the frozen waffles and put the box back in empty again.”
They all shrug, as if this is as much of an unsolvable mystery as the owl.
“Let’s try again. Why is this owl in the freezer?”
“Harry’s going to bring it in for show-and-tell when school starts,” Duff says.
“Sanjay Sapati brought in a seal skull last year. This is way better. You can still see its eyeballs. They’re only a little rotted.” Harry stirs his oatmeal, frowning down at what I’ve tried to pass off as a fun “breakfast for lunch” occasion. He upturns the spoon, shakes it, but the glob of cereal sticks, thick as paste, stubborn as my brother. Harry holds the spoon out toward me, accusingly.
“You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” I say to him.
“But I do. I do get upset. This is nasty, Alice.”
“Just eat it,” I say, clinging to patience with all my fingernails. This is all temporary. Just until Dad gets a bit better, until Mom doesn’t have to be in three places at once. “It’s healthy,” I add, but I have to agree with my seven-year-old brother. We’re way overdue for a grocery run. The fridge has nothing but eggs, applesauce, and ketchup, the cabinet is bare of anything but Joel’s protein-enhanced oatmeal. And the only thing in the freezer is . . . a dead bird.
“We can’t have an owl in here, guys.” I scramble for Mom’s reasonable tone. “It’ll make the ice cream taste bad.”
“Can we have ice cream instead of this?” Harry pushes, sticking his spoon into the oatmeal, where it pokes out like a gravestone on a gray hill.
I try to sell it as “the kind of porridge the Three Bears ate,” but George and Harry are skeptical, Duff, at eleven, is too old for all that, and Andy wrinkles her nose and says, “I’ll eat later. I’m too nervous now anyway.”
“It’s lame to be nervous about Kyle Comstock,” Duff says. “He’s a boob.”
“Boooooob, ” Patsy repeats from her high chair, the eighteen-month-old copycat.
“You don’t understand anything,” Andy says, leaving the kitchen, no doubt to try on yet another outfit before sailing camp awards. Six hours away from now.
“Who cares what she wears? It’s the stupid sailing awards,” Duff grumbles. “This stuff is vomitous, Alice. It’s like gruel. Like what they make Oliver Twist eat.”
“He wanted more,” I point out.
“He was starving, ” Duff counters.
“Look, stop arguing and eat the damn stuff.”
George’s eyes go big. “Mommy doesn’t say that word. Daddy says not to.”
“Well, they aren’t here,