Where All Light Tends to Go Read Free

were going to pop out of her head. I couldn’t stop laughing and fell into the doorframe on my way to the bathroom while she coughed and gagged and tried her damnedest to curse me without enough air to start a blow-and-go.
    There were tears streaming from my eyes by the time I made it in front of the bathroom mirror. I pulled a bottle of eyedrops out of my pocket, tilted my head back, squeezed a bead into each eye, and stared at my reflection. Seeing a smile spread across my face lumped that uneasy feeling into my throat. I shouldn’t have found how bad-off she was funny, but with a lifetime of disappointment, it was the only way to handle it. Smiles outweighed tears. Laughter outweighed pain.
    I turned on the faucet and wiped a palm full of water across my face. Daddy needed to see me in an hour, and he never liked handling business when I was stoned. My green eyes began to clear, and I brushed my thick brown hair with my wet hand. Daddy never cared that I smoked. He didn’t care that I popped pills. He drank and smoked and was known to eat a few painkillers when the mood hit him. The only drug off-limits was crank, and seeing what it’d done to my own mother, I’d never wanted anything to do with it anyways. But the line of work my father ran demanded a clear head, so I had to appear collected.
    When I headed into the main room, Mama was in the kitchen, one foot standing in the seat of a dining room chair, the other foot propped up onto the back. She leaned out over the table to get her hands on the lightbulb, her head constantly shaking hair away as she twisted the bulb free. Her shirt lifted up and her belly hung out: loose skin, no meat, and stretch marks still visible after all these years from where she’d carried me. Just when I was about to speak, the chair rocked and she slapped down out of the air onto the floor. Her head smacked the laminate tile hard, but it didn’t faze her. She popped up to her knees and scanned the room, her jaw still chewing, and I didn’t say a word. I left her there on the floor like a bad joke, a bad joke that’s really not funny at all, but that a man is forced to chuckle through until the awkwardness fades.

3.
    The Walkers belted out long, jowl-stiffening howls as I pulled up the drive. It had never seemed to matter much that I’d been the one to fill their feed bowls each morning. Those dogs still snarled and bit at the tires every time I drove up to the house. Everyone in the country knew Daddy had the meanest line of hounds to ever run bear or hog in these parts. He’d had offers from far-off places like Maine and Wisconsin to have his hounds stud, but that never interested him.
    Dogs were tied strategically across the property so that anyone making their way onto McNeely land would have to know a dance consisting of precisely thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and a chassé to get anywhere near the door without being mauled. In the old days, Daddy used it as a tactic to ensure that only the customers in the know ever made it up to the window for late-night sales. Nothing ever really moved through the house anymore, and hadn’t in years. The business was too big for that nowadays, but I guess he kept the hounds out of habit more than anything.
    I’d been around crank my whole life, so it had never been a drug, only money. When I was young, Daddy would put it to me like we were carrying on a family tradition, a matter of course that started with moonshine runs in chopped cars to make enough bread to survive the winter. It didn’t seem so bad when he put it like that. Outlawing was just a way of earning a buck. By the time I was nine or ten, Daddy had me helping him break down big bags of crystal into grams, never anything smaller, and I got a cut just like most kids got allowance. That’s what he told me anyways, though he kept the money for “safekeeping,” and merely upped the number in a little notebook for the day I’d cash out. Birthdays brought on new