We Were Kings Read Free Page A

don’t ever remember a summer this hot.”
    “Does it make it any easier, coming here, going through the house?”
    “I don’t know.” Cal frowned, considering, and his brow creased. He took a swig from the bottle. “I guess it’s something I just have to do until I don’t have to do it anymore.”
    A kid dropped from the bridge and started swimming toward the shore, crying. He swore at one of the older kids above him who had, it seemed, pushed him into the water. When he was done with the swearing but not with the crying, he ran across the beachfront to a side street.
    “It feels like it only happened yesterday,” Cal said. “I see everything over and over again. It’s like a bad dream. Every single day, a bad fucking dream.”
    “Nobody’s putting a clock on it, Cal. It doesn’t work that way.”
    “Listen to me—you know better than anyone. I’m sorry.”
    “Time, man. That’s all it takes, time.”
    Cal grunted and sipped from the bottle. “I used to think that way about the war. After I got back. I’m not so sure anymore.”
    “No,” Dante said, “neither am I. But what else are you going to say to yourself? You hope time changes things—I mean, it’s got to, right? Eventually? Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?”
    Cal handed him the bottle. A haze had come down out in the bay, and although they could hear boats out there moving across the horizon and see the signs of their passing in the swells rolling through the channel, they could not see them; even the lights of Marina Bay were lost in the haze. Distant thunder, out toward Quincy, sounded but they saw no lightning. The rumble seemed to circle the bay, coming to them loud and then diminished and then loud again.
    “So,” Cal said as they stared toward the sound, “how long do you wait, how long until things change?”
    “I don’t know. I’m still waiting.”
    The tide slowly went out and at close to eleven the kids left the bridge. They watched them passing between the streetlights, towels draped over their shoulders, as they crossed the two lanes of traffic and headed south toward Neponset. A brief breeze came up but not even that brought relief. It was the type of heat you sat in without moving, aware of your lungs working, slowly taking air in and forcing it out. The whiskey mellowed the mind—made you forget about the heat—but it also made you aware of the fragile shell you wore, a heap of skin draped over bones containing nothing but ballast and barely functioning pumps and shunts. Cal felt his heart working, a tight ache at the center of his chest, as if he’d taken a savage blow there and days later the pain had ebbed but still persisted.
    “It’s Owen’s birthday tomorrow. They’re celebrating in Dudley Square. Anne said you and Claudia should come. It’ll be fun.”
    Dante continued looking toward the bay. Only a few cars moved along Morrissey Boulevard. “Why?”
    “What do you mean, why? Why wouldn’t you be there, after everything we’ve all gone through?”
    “Owen hates my fucking guts.”
    “He doesn’t hate your fucking guts. All that’s in the past. What we did…back then…” Cal shook his head. “Jesus, he stood by you, didn’t he? He saw to it that you and your sister could adopt Maria as your own. He did all that paperwork, saw it pushed through, no questions asked. He put his ass on the line, for the both of us.”
    “I know he did. I don’t forget it.”
    Lights flashed on the giant gas tanks. The sound of the engines of planes bound for Logan came to them long after the planes had gone by, lost somewhere up there in the murk. They passed the bottle and listened to sirens wailing in other parts of the city. The streetlights dimmed and surged and dimmed again. Window fans turned in slow metallic circles, changing speeds with the current. Cal could hear the small, electric clicks in their motors as they stopped and then engaged, whirring like summer bugs.
    “Look, it’ll be fun,” Cal