Songs Only You Know Read Free Page A

half lit by the interior bulbs, “stay outta the fucking street.”
    He yanked shut the door and peeled out.
    The minivan ascended the slightest incline toward an unknown area of the neighborhood. If only Will had been there, seeing it through to some different end: his bat confiscated as evidence while I was cuffed and hauled to the clink or scraped from the pavement. A lawsuit. A funeral.
    Instead—here was another story I’d never tell honestly.
    I sprinted after the taillights, keeping off the sidewalk, scrambling through unfamiliar front yards. A few blocks up I found the minivan parked in the driveway of a house just like ours, only the walkway to the front porch was lined with shin-high halogen path lamps. Crouched behind a shrub across the street, I raised my head to watch the lamps sequentially go dark and come aglow again as a figure passed each one.
    “Ay!” I yelled, swiveling to tear ass home. “I know where you live.”
    M OM WAS PACING THE hallway when I slipped through the back door. Ozzy grazed her legs, clacking his nails along the floorboards. All the rooms were dark as I made for the front window to monitor the street for headlights. Bits of asphalt were cratered into my back and I felt the burn of a skinned elbow. SomehowI’d worked myself into a frenzy that had canceled all thoughts of my dad.
    “Are you waiting for him?” Mom said.
    The blue robe she’d worn for years was tied at her waist. As a child, I’d nestled in its dangling sleeves when she’d read novels or watched
Dallas
. Her blonde hair was pulled taut, revealing fully her huge eyes shining wetly against her soft, freckled skin. A small mouth, like mine. If she’d so much as smoked a joint in the seventies, if she’d ever cursed or knowingly wounded a living thing, I was aware of it. Nor had I sensed any limit to her kindness, which asked very little of me in return; what she wanted most was for my sister and me to live lives unburdened by heavy pain. One of my friends in the old neighborhood called her “Ma,” and another had claimed she looked like an owl, a pretty owl-woman. Tired as she was, her face was strong, a beautiful sight.
    “You should go upstairs,” I said.
    It had been years since I’d told her much about my life, yet in her presence I’d feel our moods altering each other without a word. An emotional telepathy I shared only with her. She took a breath, getting a read on me.
    “What’s with the bat?” she said.
    The Easton was turned down at my side, my palm balanced on the butt of the handle. Any other night she’d have pleaded with me to return the bat to where it belonged. She’d have asked questions that shamed me into admitting the right thing to do. Just then she might have been hoping Dad would sulk through the back door; if he had, she might not have said a word to restrain me. In her bedroom upstairs Caitlin would be volted awake by sounds of me demolishing the kitchen table and backing him into a corner. Mom might close her eyes, praying that enough would be enough.
    “I’m gonna wait for him,” I said.
    “Get some sleep,” she said. “Letting this control us won’t do any good.”
    Outside the windows, the street was empty. The gunman must have been peeling off his shirt, sliding into the sheets next to his sleeping wife. Down the hallway, his kids dreamed openmouthed in the air-conditioned twilight. As I lay awake in a bed my father had built by hand, I wondered if the man kept his firearm near as he slept, if it had even been loaded. Possibly he’d relive the scene with each coming day as his minivan rolled through that same quiet intersection. He’d remember why he carried a pistol. Staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, he might figure he’d done the right thing.
    Through my bedroom’s open window the highway was a distant white noise. Caitlin lay just beyond the wall—resting soundly, I hoped. She’d always be the one I worried most about, tucked away as she often was,