Brighton Read Free Page B

Barry’s she’d fixed.
    “Want me to make some?” She held up a package of Jiffy corn muffin mix. Kevin loved corn muffins and his mom thought it made up for everything else. At nineteen cents a package, it was a cheap fix.
    “Sure, Ma. Corn muffins would be great.”
    That was all the absolution she needed. Ten minutes later, they were ready—thin, gritty meal, but hot with a dollop of butter. Kevin ate two of them with tea. His mom sat with him and stared into some blank space only she could visit. After a few minutes, she stiffened in her chair, eyes moving to the hallway.
    “Your father’s up.”
    Kevin heard the hollow fear in her voice and felt it balloon in his belly. He scooped up another muffin, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and made his way to the back door. She helped him slip on his coat.
    “Ma.” He pulled away, but she still managed a kiss on the cheek.
    “Got you.” She wiped at the spot with the flat of her thumb and pushed back the hair from his forehead. “I love you, Kevin.”
    “I gotta go.”
    She took him by the chin and forced his eyes onto hers. “I do, Kevin. You know that.”
    “Yeah.” There was the sound of water now from the bathroom. “I gotta go.”
    She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Stop upstairs and see her.”
    “I’m running late.”
    “Stop up and see her. It’ll only take a minute.”
    Kevin grabbed his glove and slipped onto the landing, his mom snapping the lock behind him. He listened to the scrape ofa kitchen chair and the cut of voices through the thin wooden door. Then he turned and took the stairs, two at a time.

    The big cat slouched in a shadow, easy in his skin, watching as the boy ran up the stairs, Indian quiet, a baseball glove slapping off his thigh as he went. The boy disappeared into the third-floor apartment and the cat waited, almond eyes tick-tocking back and forth between the front windows of the cab office and the top floor where the old lady lived. Leaves chattered in the breeze. The cat flared his nostrils and squinted against the sun, dipped in fifty shades of cold heat and rising fast, its nascent rays caught in a stray pane of white glass. He thought about the boy. Then the old lady. It would be another hour before she made her way across the yard. The big cat shrank back into the scrub and settled in to wait.

4
    MARY BURKE sipped at her tea and thought about her shorties. She had them stashed all over the apartment, waiting for a late night or early morning when Horrigan’s was closed and she needed one. She got up from the kitchen table and walked into the living room, playing bent fingers among the dust bunnies that lived on the ledge over the door. Her cigarette butt was crouched in the corner just where she’d left it. Mary took it back to the kitchen and lit up, pulling the velvet smoke down into her lungs. At night she could sometimes feel the phlegm, thick and hard and brown, and the pump as her heart skipped and struggled. Mary would hack and cough until she’d cleared a passageway and her heart had settled back into its normal rhythm. Then she’d light up again, just to show her lungs who was boss. She’d lie in bed and listen to Larry Glick on the radio, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling and thinking about cycles within cycles—dreamless days that blended, one into another.
    She’d been born sixty years ago at the same table where she took her breakfast. The sixth of seven, Mary grew up silent and smart. Her mother died when she was thirteen. They told the neighbors she’d fallen down a flight of stairs, but Mary knew better. When her father fell down the same flight six months later, Mary and Shuks (one of her five brothers and Mary’s favorite) stared down at his body from the landing and thought that was just about right. She married in the winter when she was seventeen. Today they’d probably call it rape, but once her future husband took her cherry she didn’t really have much choice. And thinking about