Watch Over Me Read Free Page A

her mouth still moving.
    Unable to read her lips now, he scribbled, What? and held the pad in front of her face.
    She looked at him. “Nothing. Sorry,” she said, and followed Jaylyn outside.
    He hated that. The nothing s and never mind s. As if it took too much effort to repeat the words, and he wasn’t worth a minute more of conversation, another lungful of air. But he was used to it, too.
    He couldn’t go without breakfast, so he took the three steps to the kitchen and filled a bowl with cornflakes. Opening the refrigerator, he stood inside it while he poured milk on his cereal, indulging in the rush of cold around him, a few guilty seconds of luxury. He slid the near-empty jug back onto the top shelf and elbowed the door closed.
    The cereal, a store brand that came in a huge plastic bag, lost its crunch before Matthew sucked the first bite off the spoon. Still, he finished it, the soggy flakes filling the pits in his molars. He dug the mush out with his tongue, a silvery pain shooting through his jaw as he brushed the cavity he needed to have filled. Then he drank the warm, gritty milk left in the bottom of the bowl and opened the cabinet again to get his pillbox, hidden on the second shelf behind a stack of dishes so Lacie wouldn’t be tempted to play with it. Once he forgot and left it on the counter, and later found his youngest cousin twirling around the kitchen, shaking the blue plastic case like a maraca and singing.
    With his thumbnail, he popped open the square labeled Thursday Morning and dumped the pills into his palm. Orange footballs, white capsules, and pastel wafers that look like Easter candies. Blood thinners and stool softeners, vitamin supplements and phosphate binders—he could take all eight in one gulp, and did, feeling as if he swallowed a handful of gravel and drinking a full glass of water to wash them all the way to his stomach. If not, he would belch up bitterness until lunch.
    His noontime pills and between-meals pills he rolled in a paper napkin, to take with him for later.
    He looked at the clock—already close to eight. In the bathroom he saw a speck of silver glittering at the bottom of the toilet and flushed. When the bowl refilled, the speck was still there, so he reached in and washed it and his hands with soap. Skye’s earring, a skull-and-crossbones stud. Her favorite. He left it on her pillow.
    Rushing now, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and stuffed his notebooks and medication into the pockets, then lifted the top off the Rubbermaid tote in the corner of the living room. All his clothes fit in there, and he shuffled through to find his collared shirt, a yellow polo style with a bundle of green, black, and white stripes banded around his chest. He put it on, stared for a moment at his good chinos folded at the top of the pile, then snapped the lid closed. His mother wasn’t worth pants in near 100-degree heat. She wasn’t worth a collared shirt, either, not worth a single drop of the sweat that would sprout at the nape of his neck and slide down his back beneath the heavy piqué fabric. But Matthew remembered the fifth commandment. “ Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”
    He flipped the lid off the tote again and took out a clean pair of shorts to wear.
    He needed all the days he could get.
    There wasn’t a single taxicab company in Beck County. Not one in Castle, either. Matthew pedaled to the main roadway, stashed his bicycle in the tall grasses near the on-ramp, and waited. A car rattled by, then another, ignoring his outstretched thumb. Already his head and mouth felt fuzzy. He couldn’t stay in the sun much longer.
    Finally a pickup steered onto the shoulder. The driver rolled down his window.
    “Where you going, son?”
    Matthew opened his pad. He’d already written Hollings.
    “You got a tongue in that mouth