Thieves I've Known Read Free

going to die by the end of the week. She’s dying right now as he’s thinking this. He’s overcome with guilt. He loves her very much. And, at the same time, and he’s not proud of this, he’s happy. Because now he can be who he is. In fact, he already is who he is.”
    Merrill looks over at her brother. He has stepped off the curb and is walking beside her now. She can tell by the way that he moves that this is the last story of the night.
    â€œGo ahead,” Nate says. “I want to hear the finish.”
    Merrill keeps walking but steps down off the curb too. “The next evening, the door closes. The door in outer space closes. One of the astronauts had a good idea. All five of them now, they’re going to make it back just fine. The husband, he lies in bed with his lover. The two people that he loves most in the world are alive. This makes him feel alive. He feelslike his heart is going to jump out of his chest and burn the house to the ground. Bad times are ahead, but he’s happy for the first time in his life. When his lover starts to snore, it doesn’t bother the husband as much as it used to. He doesn’t notice the noise so much. He notices his lover’s breath moving in and out.”
    Nate kicks a soda can. He puts his hands back in his pockets. Merrill has worked on that story all week. She has tried to get it just right. Having told it now, she feels like the second half started to fall apart. She should’ve left out the snoring part. She looks at her watch. It’s almost midnight.
    Nate looks ahead. There are a few more houses, though their father’s trailer is still a mile past this neighborhood. Nate spits. This is a habit he has taken up recently. It annoys Merrill to no end. She suddenly shivers. It’s cold out. The stories—especially the creepy chair story for some reason—had kept her warm. She feels as if a thin ghost has passed very quickly and uncomfortably through her. When she remembers this walk, years later, she’ll remember Nate as the one with the shivers.
    â€œDo you think they’re watching us?” she says. “Who?”
    She points up at the houses. “The people in there.”
    Nate shrugs. “Why would they bother?”
    â€œIt might be interesting for them.” Merrill considers the light in the windows. “We seem as if we’re just outside, but we’re actually far, far away.”

FROM BREMERTON
    Shelby woke before sunrise, dressed in her warmest clothes in the dark. In the kitchen, she packed her book bag with apples and bread, some peanut butter. She added a map of Seattle, a carton of cigarettes she’d hidden at the top of a cabinet, and then brewed some coffee on the stove. She walked barefoot in the trailer so as not to wake her sister and the boyfriend. It was still dark outside by the time she poured the coffee into her thermos, and out through the window she could see the dull yellow glow of a streetlamp at the edge of the trailer park. Rain fell in the lamp glow, and she could hear the drops clicking against the top of the trailer. She wished she were back in bed, but she’d made a promise the week before, to a boy that she was in love with, although she was not now sure if she was still in love. Lots of things—her love for the boy, her grades in school, her future, or what she hoped to be her future—were in doubt. Wisps of fog disappeared in the rain. Before leaving, and because it was her nature, she put away the beer cans and the pizza boxes from the night before, emptied the ashtrays, wiped down the counters. She slipped into her boots, pulled her woolen cap over her ears, and closed the door, quietly, on her way out.
    In the puddles of mud and slush outside she caught a blurred, distant reflection of her own gaze, a reflection that she liked: dark and small, without many features, a work in progress it seemed. She stepped around the puddles when she