Rise Read Free

tired? He stood on his pedals and pumped them hard, and the other boys were so ordinary compared to him.
    The Lord ordered Michael and Raphael to kill the nephilim one by one. To bind their fathers under the hills for seventy generations. The crops could grow once they were gone. The trees could push out shoots. Hunger is a terrible thing, her mother had told her more than once. It’s like a hot rock in your belly and you can feel it burning. She knew this from her childhood in Nebraska. The days so black you couldn’t find your way from the steps to your front door. The wind blew the seeds right off the field, and days later the alfalfa sprouted in barnyards and distant cemeteries where the seeds had scattered. Hunger has no mercy when it comes, she’d say. But hunger was their burden, and they should have carried it.
    He bought Mrs. Dillman’s old ’72 Gremlin the week he turned sixteen. It was butterscotch gold with racing stripes, and he waved at Freda when he drove by. His arm hung out the window, and he was proud as Hannibal coming over the Alps the way he raised his hand. He used cloth diapers and three coats of Mothers Wax to bring out the luster. He installed a fancy K&N air filter, and every day after school he was out there in the driveway. He rolled back and forth under the car, and his sister stood beside him and handed him the wrenches.
    That’s where he was the day his mother left. Freda saw the truck when it pulled up. Teddy brought the suitcases out to the curb and hoisted them into the bed, and he held the door for his mother. He didn’t cry and he didn’t wave when the truck rounded the corner. Hekept on waxing his car. So many coats Freda lost count, and he was still there working the diaper when the sky was dark and the driveway floodlights came on. His mother had a boyfriend and his mother was gone, and Teddy was still there working when Freda went to bed.
    He painted her trim the summer before his senior year. He sanded her gutters, too, and painted them chocolate brown. He cut down a broken branch from her maple tree and brushed sealant on the open bark to keep the fungus out. She looked for jobs to give him because next summer he’d be gone. He was a cadet in the Junior ROTC, and he’d be going away to college. Up to Boulder or Greeley or maybe to Fort Collins. He did pushups and jumping jacks on his front lawn, and once his sister sat sidesaddle along his back to make the pushups harder.
    He sealed the cracks in her driveway and painted her cement steps. All she could do was watch. She leaned on her walker like it was a banister and told him what to do. The juniper bushes needed trimming and some of her window well covers were cracked, and after he was done the house looked as nice as it did when her parents were alive and still working in the garden.
    She kept her household money in a Folgers Coffee can. He came inside with her and poured himself a lemonade from her pitcher while she counted out the bills. Somewhere up the street there were children shouting and the sounds of splashing water. Mrs. Dillman had an above-ground pool she filled every summer for her grandkids. Freda took ten five-dollar bills and set them on the table. Her walker scraped across the linoleum as she pulled it around. The kitchen felt so big when he was there beside her.
    â€œI think the rubber’s loose.” He pointed to the bottom of her walker. “I can glue it back on for you and then it’ll be real smooth.” He leaned in to get a better look, and Freda caught his chin and cupped it in her hand. That face she’d known since he was little. That sad face and those eyes that slanted downward. She wanted to remember him. He wasn’t even gone yet. He was right here in her kitchen, but she was seeing him from some distant point ten or twenty years in the future. She was seeing him in her memory standing by her table. He was seventeen and in a dirty white