Watch Over Me Read Free Page B

of yours?”
    He flipped his pad over, showing the driver the words already printed on the back cover. I’M DEAF. I READ LIPS.
    “Deaf, eh?”
    Matthew nodded.
    “Foolish thing, hitchhiking. ’Specially when you can’t hear nothing.” The man took off his Twins cap, wiped his hairline with his cuff. “Get in.”
    In the truck, Matthew dropped his backpack on the floor and unzipped it, took out a bottle of water. He drank all of it, and half of another. Too much. He was allowed only four cups of liquid a day.
    Goosebumps sprouted on his arms, his sweaty skin reacting to the air-conditioning like a vinegar and baking soda experiment. He flipped the vent toward the driver, who glanced at him and said something; Matthew couldn’t read his sideways mouth but nodded anyway. The man slid the air control to low.
    Matthew looked out the passenger window. He counted hay bales, four hundred and ninety-seven during the twenty-minute ride, his eyes flickering over the fields, grouping, estimating, the numbers adding themselves. In Hollings, he walked a couple of miles to the bus station and bought a ticket to Pierre.
    Aunt Heather might have driven him to visit his mother on Saturday, if he’d asked, or she might have made her boyfriend do it. But he didn’t want anyone to know. He’d been planning to go alone for nearly a year, and wasn’t quite sure why he chose today to do so. He only knew that he had fallen asleep last night ready, finally, to take his trip. His aunt thought he was sitting in the high school computer lab, completing on-line classwork.
    The bus crossed the bridge into Pierre, a gray city on a gray day, the street lined with gas stations and hotels and fast-food restaurants. Matthew got off at the station, walked to his mother’s apartment building—three floors high, with the bottom floor half underground, the bluish siding a patchwork of dark and light stripes, newly replaced boards between the old. He prayed as he approached the main door. An elderly man with a cane stood just behind the glass, trying to push outside while dragging his wheeled shopping basket. Matthew rushed over, held the door open for him.
    “Thank you much, young man,” he said.
    Matthew smiled and slipped through, trudged up the hot stairway and banged on his mother’s apartment. The peephole darkened; Melissa Savoie opened the door, smirk on her face.
    “This isn’t my kid. He doesn’t ever come see me,” she said. “He’s too good for me, that boy.”
    Matthew’s hands shook as he fumbled to find a blank sheet in his notepad. Can I come in?
    “By all means. This don’t happen every day, you know. Is Heather with you?”
    I came alone.
    “You drive now?”
    Bus.
    He wiped his feet on the plastic runner, took off his sneakers and his backpack. The apartment had new carpeting since his last visit. Dark blue, almost purple, and plush. He sunk into it as he crossed the room to the small kitchen table.
    “You want a drink?”
    He shook his head.
    “I have root beer. Well, diet. It used to be your favorite. You used to sneak it, and pour it over your cereal when you were little. That kind you liked.”
    Cocoa Krispies.
    “Yeah, that. So, you want some?”
    He had used root beer on his cereal because it was often the only beverage his mother had in the house. And she’d been too strung out to get up and make him breakfast.
    He shook his head again.
    “Suit yourself,” she said, sitting across from him.
    I’m sick , he wrote, turning the words to his mother.
    “Tell me something I don’t know.”
    It’s worse than before.
    Her mouth pulled in, the lines around her lips giving her a toothy appearance, as if she wore her jawbone on the outside. “Heather told me.”
    I need a kidney.
    “You think I’m gonna give you mine?”
    He wouldn’t ask if she would, fearing the answer. He knew she had loved him once; he remembered that, remembered her lifting him onto the handlebars of her rusty three-speed bicycle and