Luke Read online

  ***

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELIAS

  I drove through town on the way to my house, down along Main Street, passing the little coffee shop, and the ice cream parlor, and the stores that sold all kinds of country knickknacks. West Bend was the kind of small town you see in movies, with a downtown that looked like it had been transplanted straight out of the fifties. By all appearances, it was a quaint little place, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. If you were just visiting West Bend, one of the tourists who came through during winter ski season, that's definitely the impression you would get.

  That's what River thought, I knew that much. I could see the expression on her face, when we were driving out here, and then pulling up to the bed and breakfast.

  Of course, a visitor didn't know West Bend like I did. A visitor had no history here, the kind of history that comes from growing up in a place where your brother did what mine did. A place where your parents were who mine were.

  A place where you were a fucking pariah.

  Memory never fades, not in a small town like this. Your sins only become more amplified, cautionary tales passed down from generation to generation.

  We lived on the outskirts of town, on a couple of acres my father had purchased before the town was the size it was now. Size it is now was really an exaggeration. There were maybe a couple thousand people in West Bend. But when I was younger, it was even smaller. Even more closed off and closed minded.

  There were some more stores and more rich people with second homes here, and more tourists coming down here during ski season, but the town hadn't changed all that much. At least not out where my family's house was. Out there, out on the edges of town, it was still folks eking out whatever kind of existence they could. Out there, it was people like my father, who owned a tiny patch of dirt and worked the land for whatever they could get from it. It was the way he had done with the coal mine on our property.

  People think of coal mines as these big places run by mining companies. But the truth is, there's people who, at least when I was a kid, got away with mining on their own property. It was kind of like bootlegging, almost – except legal. My father had the permit he needed when we were kids, and it wasn't some complicated operation. It was pretty straightforward – him putting blasting caps on the side of the mountain on our property, blasting away a little bit at a time. He sold coal the way that people sell firewood, this business that provided us just barely enough to scratch out an existence.

  And then he drank away most of what he earned, came home angry, ready to lay into whoever crossed him.

  Then the shit happened with Silas - the trouble with the explosives, when he set them off unauthorized and my father lost that mining permit - and there was no more mining. My father became a janitor in our high school.

  Then we were the kids of the drunk high school janitor.

  To say I was happy to leave West Bend was a fucking understatement.

  I was running from West Bend full throttle as soon as I could get gone.

  It’s funny the way life works. Things always come round full circle when you least expect them to. I swore to everything I believed in that I’d never come back here again. The one time I returned, to make sure my brother Silas wasn't fucking dead, only confirmed that I needed to stay the hell away from this place.

  Ahead of me, the house stood in stark contrast to the houses I’d passed on the way out of town. My parents hadn’t kept up with the repairs, I could tell that much, although I guessed the repairs on the piece of shit would have been more than the house was worth. It hadn’t been a nice place when I was growing up, and it was even less of a nice place now.

  A dog wandered up to the car. I wasn’t sure if it was a stray or not.

  The door to the house opened and a figure stood in the frame, shadowed by the overhang of the doorway in the mid-afternoon light. She shielded her eyes from the sun, but I could see her squinting at me. She stepped outside, wearing a satin bathrobe and heeled slippers, rollers in her hair, waving at the dog. “Get away from the car and leave him be, you mangy mutt.”

  I opened the door and stepped out, and the dog slinked away into the yard. “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  ***

  “Is that him?” I asked.

  My mother lit a cigarette, blew smoke through the kitchen before she answered. She played with the book of matches on the kitchen table, then pulled her satin robe tighter around her before she answered. “That’s him,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with him so I left him there.”

  “Flushing him would work,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of him sitting there in an urn on the mantle, like he was watching over us or something. As if he was some kind of beloved father figure.

  “Elias, you don’t mean that,” she said. She crossed her feet, dangled the kitten slipper with the furry pom-pom on top off the end of her toe. My mother was stuck somewhere in the fifties, in many ways, the least of which involved her wardrobe. “It’s unchristian to speak of the dead like that.”

  I wasn’t able to stifle the laugh, the sound bitter. “Well, it was unchristian for him to be a worthless drunk and child-beater.”

  “Your father had his own demons, Elias,” she said. “Someday you’ll understand that.”

  “I doubt it.” That much was true. I’d never understand why my father was who he was, cold and callous when he wasn’t drunk, worse than that when he was.

  And I’d never understand why the hell my mother stayed, so wrapped up in a blanket of denial she was rarely aware of the horror under her own nose.

  She smoked, but she didn’t drink or drug; at least there was that. My mother’s vice was religion. She clung to it like a drug. Before she had us, she was a wild child, partying and out of control, at least according to the stories she told us. That’s when she had my oldest brother, the one who caused all of the trouble, who changed the course of our lives in this town. She was sixteen when he was born. She became staunchly religious, but not any particular brand of religion. She incorporated bits and pieces of things she’d come across, then vehemently claim them as her own- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, it didn’t matter.

  My three brothers and I came much later, after she’d married our father.

  Abraham Saint.

  Growing up, she’d tell us that she knew it was her destiny when she met him- his name gave it away. It was a sign from God that she'd come across this man with the religious name.

  The truth was, it was just the opposite. He wasn’t a gift from God. He was a curse.

  But she’d persisted, kept on believing. She gave us the names of saints, in some misguided notion that naming us after saints would somehow protect us. My mother was perpetually naive.

  The drumming of her nails on the table shook me from my thoughts.

  “Elias,” she said, covering my hand with hers. She smiled sadly, her face pale even underneath the carefully applied makeup. She was always a beautiful woman, and still was now, even after the years of my father’s bullshit. “Will you stay? The house is so empty since he’s been gone.”

  My mother was never good at being on her own. She was one of those people who were only people in the presence of others, who somehow ceased to exist when they were on their own. Her expression was childlike in its intensity, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. "For a little while, mom."

  The truth was, I wasn't sure how long I was going to stay in West Bend, or what I was going to do. I was running, but I didn't know where I was running to.

  She nodded. "A little while is good," she said. She was silent for a moment before she finally spoke. "Your leg- how is it?"

  "It's okay, mom," I said. It was an uncharacteristically direct question, coming from my mother. She'd acknowledged my injury only once, after it happened, on the phone. She hadn't come to see me in the hospital, but I also hadn't expected that.

  "Does it hurt?"

  "Now?" I shook my head. "Sometimes, I mean