The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

times, he borrowed Mom’s car to take one of them — Mandy or Kaitlyn or Chrissy or whoever it happened to be — to Leeville or Boelen.

The rare times he was home, he holed himself up in his room listening to Metallica and Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard. One night as I walked past his closed door, I heard the familiar pulse and echoing melancholy of “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak” and I was hit with a wave of nostalgia that made my heart ache. I continued down the hall to my room, where I sat on my ugly green carpet with my bins of Lego. I kicked one of the bins, enjoying the satisfying crash of the pieces colliding against each other. Then I put my head on my knees and began counting silently, doing my best to ignore the hot tears soaking through my jeans.

Ricky became a stranger, a heavy presence in the house, a shadow. I hardly ever saw him, but I knew when he was there. Mom and I settled into a routine that didn’t include him: eating dinner when he worked at Pizza Hut, watching TV together when he went out with different girls or else shut himself in his room blasting his heavy metal. My stomach aches eventually went away, but the nightmares persisted. I passed through grade five in a detached state. I worked hard at not thinking about anything, at floating through the days in a state of oblivion. It was better, I thought, than sitting on my carpet crying.

CHAPTER THREE

•

“I GOT A JOB AT the Future Shop in Leeville,” Ricky announced.

Mom looked up from the pattern she was cross stitching in her reading chair and raised her eyebrows. “What about Pizza Hut?”

“I’m quitting. This is full-time.”

Within a week, Ricky’d packed his things and moved into the house of a friend of a friend, some guy who worked in construction that we’d never heard of before. I don’t know if what I felt after he left was relief so much as a loosening up, a spreading out. Like I was slowly expanding again.

I’d just finished grade five, and with Ricky gone, the summer seemed to stretch out before me like one long exhale. “What are you going to do with his room?” I asked Mom.

“I don’t know. I thought we’d just keep it like it is for when he visits. No?”

“I guess,” I said. “I wanted to move some of my stuff in there. Like my dollhouse, because it takes up so much space. Can I use his closet?”

“Sure,” Mom said, but she seemed distracted. She was sorting through the mail, setting certain pieces to one side. She stopped once and put her hand at the base of her neck, a confused look crossing her face, but then she continued as if nothing had happened.

I washed our breakfast dishes and put them away, keeping a close eye on Mom. I could sense a thin bubble of anxiety around her as she opened each envelope; I knew any kind of stress wasn’t good for her. Eventually, she set the mail aside and said she was going to lie down, so I snuck into Ricky’s room to have a look at his closet. He’d left a bunch of stuff in it: a few dress shirts that I’d never seen him wear; a forgotten sock, balled-up in the corner; a pair of slippers Mom had given him for Christmas. He’d also left two baseball caps on the top shelf, sitting side by side. I looked long and hard at those hats.

I threw everything he’d left in his closet into a garbage bag and shoved it in a corner of the basement. If Ricky wanted any of it, he should’ve taken it with him. I was afraid to throw his stuff out completely in case he asked about it later and got mad, but I didn’t want anything that belonged to him left in his closet or his room. Especially not the hats. They made me queasy, sitting up there, like some sort of sick joke.

After emptying his closet, I opened the bedroom window as wide as it would go and pulled the blankets and sheets off his bed. I opened every one of his dresser drawers, checking to see if he’d left any other pieces of himself behind. He hadn’t. Propelled by some urge I didn’t understand, I used a rag and large amounts of lemon-scented Pledge to dust his dresser, his nightstand, and even the windowsill. Finally, I lugged Mom’s Hoover down the hall and vacuumed every square centimetre of his carpet. When I was done, the room smelled like lemons and sunshine, not like Ricky’s old room at all.

Mom found me in there, sitting on the edge of his bare mattress. “You miss him, don’t you?” she said, coming to sit beside me. I didn’t know how to tell her that she couldn’t have been further from the truth.

THIS WAS AROUND THE SAME time the library burned down and while a temporary new location was quickly established at City Hall, Mom had to find another job because there wasn’t enough space or work for everyone to keep their old hours. It would be almost two years before the library officially re-opened in the large Edwardian mansion donated by the Gordon family and many years after that before they were able to build the collection back up.

I was thrown off by Mom’s uncharacteristic tears in response to the fire. It wasn’t just losing her job that she was upset about, she tried to explain to me, it was all those books. Technically, she still worked for the library, but her hours had been cut back to almost nothing and she’d started cutting coupons from the paper for everything from cereal and cheese to rubber boots.

Mom found a second job cleaning Dr. Richardson’s office, but it meant she had to work in the evenings, after the office was closed. It also meant I was home