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

doesn’t Jason deserve just as much? Doesn’t Parker? Because if the reason I let Amir go was to save him from me and all of my miserable failings, then shouldn’t I do the same for Jason? Jason, after all, is the one who made my life worth living again when I’d pretty much given up on the whole happiness thing. Doesn’t he deserve at least as much as Amir?

What I should be doing right now is confronting Ricky to find out exactly what’s going on. I can’t just blunder blindly into making life-altering decisions without knowing the facts. So why haven’t I called him instead of exchanging cryptic texts where I pretend nothing else is happening other than the fact that our mother had a mild heart attack? But I know why. I know exactly why. Because I don’t really want to hear the truth. I will cling to my flimsy shards of doubt until they are ripped, piece by piece, from my bleeding hands.

CHAPTER FIVE

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I WENT TO SEE WALTER the night before he left for Waterloo. Neither one of us ever mentioned the incident in his basement where I almost punched him in the face, except for the one feeble suggestion I made about paying to fix the wall. Walter had waved away my offer and I didn’t pursue it. That last night, even though we did the same things we always did, the entire evening felt contrived. Even our normally competitive foosball matches lacked conviction and I got the impression that Walter was letting me win.

“You nervous?” I asked him.

“A little. Liz had a terrible roommate her first year and it got so bad she had to move. I just hope I get someone who’s okay.”

Liz was the youngest of his four sisters. I’d never heard Walter mention anything before about her having problems at university. It seemed to me that his sisters had fluttered away to different schools, and when they came back to visit, they all chirped happily about their lives: activities and people and places impossibly removed from tiny Dunford.

“It’s going to be weird, not having you around,” I said. And even though Walter was standing a few feet away from me, it felt like he was already gone.

THAT SEPTEMBER, I DID GET my Operator-in-Training license and, true to his word, Steve got me a job at the Water Treatment Plant. I was the only female. As the newest employee, not to mention the youngest, I was given all the crap jobs, like cleaning out the bottoms of the clarifier tanks, which are twenty feet deep.

“Here,” Roger said, handing me a harness the first time I prepared to scale to the bottom of an empty tank. “You ever gone rock climbing? Same idea.”

I rappelled myself down the still-wet wall until I landed on the bottom of the cement basin, shivering in the damp air. Roger yelled out instructions from the catwalk. The whole time I was blasting the layers of sediment and sludge with a heavy hose, I was imagining Walter shaking his head at me in disappointment. Is this really what you want? his imaginary eyes asked.

During those first weeks at the plant, I thought a lot about my summer job with the Parks Division, when I’d spent my days outside in the sun, puttering alongside the Still River in a golf cart. It had been a good gig, but it was a kid’s job. And seasonal. Working at the plant was a real job, full-time, and while I might have originally considered it to be temporary, I could see myself settling in, falling into a rhythm of days that were reassuring in their predictability.

Walter came home that first Thanksgiving full of stories. He said his roommate was cool, the campus was huge, but most of his classes were only a twelve-minute walk from his residence, and then he went on and on about Wednesday nights at the Bomber — the on-campus pub — which was so popular you could wait in line for over an hour just to get in. I don’t think he was trying to rub it in, how much fun he was having, but hearing him describe his new life and his new friends made me jealous. I started to second-guess my plan not to return to school, glimpsing an alternate future for myself in Walter’s detailed descriptions of a life outside of Dunford.

Walter asked me about the plant, too, and he pretended to be interested while I explained what I did there, but it was obvious, at least to me, that already we had almost nothing left in common.

AFTER HEARING ABOUT WALTER'S LIFE in Waterloo, I began to crave the kind of independence he so clearly enjoyed. I considered the very real possibility of moving out of my childhood bedroom. I looked at a few different rental units around town and after more than a year of hemming and hawing, I bought the small bungalow on Pine Street where I still live.

Ricky was already living in Toronto by then — he’d quit his job at Future Shop to go into real estate — and had started using his full name, Richard, which he’d had embossed on fancy business cards. He’d also met a woman named Lauren that he seemed semi-serious about.

When I told Ricky about my bungalow on Pine Street, I thought he might be impressed that I’d purchased my first house before I was even twenty-one. “I bet you don’t get too many clients my age,” I said.

“Houses are dirt cheap in Dunford. You want to make an investment? Buy something in Toronto.”

Mom was more supportive, but she couldn’t understand why I needed my own place when she was happy to have me live at home for as long as I wanted. And by that, I think she meant until I met my Prince Charming and went to live with him in his castle. Still, she never tried to stop me. She just made sure I knew