The Lightning Rule Read Free Page A

Next, he checked the refrigerator. The twelve-pack purchased a day ago, also to humor his brother, was gone. Emmett regretted buying the booze, but hated to deny Edward his sole pleasure. The thing that made his brother’s life tolerable made Emmett’s more burdensome sip by sip.
    “Say, when are you gonna take a day off and keep me company? I’m sick of playing solitaire, and I sure as hell can’t play gin rummy alone.”
    Edward’s question was timed with the closing of the refrigerator door, guilt to distract from the missing beer. Each had guessed the other’s game.
    “Soon,” Emmett replied. “Soon.”
    He had already used most of his vacation days when Edward first came home and was saving the remainder in case of an emergency. The ploy aside, his brother was genuinely lonely. Edward refused to let his friends visit and wouldn’t take calls from the women he had dated. He was too ashamed to see them. Though his seclusion was self-imposed, the confines of the house were grating on him. Emmett had built a plywood ramp up the steep pitch to the front door, seven feet above street level, however the slope was too precarious for Edward to manage. Stranded, he whiled away the hours sitting on the back porch in the shade under a tin awning, overlooking their small scrap of a yard. That was as far as he would or could go unaccompanied.
    “Soon ain’t soon enough, Marty, because lemme tell you, it’s a real ball of laughs being trapped here by myself when it’s a million degrees. I’m bored outta my skull. This isn’t Rear -friggin’- Window , my friend,” Edward ranted, slurring. “There’s no Grace Kelly and there’s nobody murdering anybody across the alley. The murdering part, that’s your bag, man. Hell, I don’t even get the lousy little dog.” He hung his head, as though he had actually been deprived of a dog of his own. “This is abuse, man. Cruel and unusual punishment. Hey, you know what I should do? I should call the cops.”
    Emmett watched from the kitchen as his brother cracked up. Tipsyand giggling, a stray lock of hair fell onto his cheek. After leaving the VA hospital, Edward had let his beard grow in and his hair grow out. It skimmed his chin where a scraggly goatee struggled to gain ground. Emmett kept his hair cropped close in a flattop and shaved every morning, department regulations. He was four years older than Edward, yet they were the same height. Were it not for the wheelchair, they still would be. In their younger years, they had often been mistaken for twins. Now it was a stretch to see how they were related.
    Once the TV dinners were ready, they ate dinner off trays in front of the television, Edward’s balanced across the arms of his wheelchair. Emmett silently said grace over his food. He didn’t invite Edward to join him in prayer. That would have gotten another laugh or started a fight. Saying grace was something they had done every evening as a family when their parents were alive. Their mother had died a little over a year ago, their father the year before that. Emmett had boxed up his grief along with his parents’ possessions, which he carted off to Saint Casimir’s to be donated as per their wishes. Edward had no such closure, and Emmett believed the quick succession of their deaths was what had driven him to the army and to his eventual fate, confined to the wheelchair he despised more and more each day. Suggesting they say grace together would have rubbed salt in a wound that had yet to heal for his brother, so Emmett prayed by himself.
    As usual, he sat in his father’s old lounger, not the couch. That way Edward could pull next to him and they could sit side by side. The couch went untouched, a constant reminder of his brother’s new limitations. Their father’s chair had once been off limits as well. No one was allowed on it besides him, including their mother. A meager throne, the fabric was worn soft, the cushions molded to their father’s form. As