He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to
forget the sound the Allen had made.
#
"What is wrong with you?"
"Not a thing," she said. Her brother's phone-call hadn't been
unexpected.
"You're fucking insane."
"Maybe," she said.
"What do you *want from me*?"
"I want you to behave yourself."
"You're completely fucking insane."
He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to
the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a
note on the kitchen table, terse: "Gone out. B." The handwriting sent
him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days
when they'd been a family, when he'd signed Brad's report cards and
hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.
Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare
words there. She was draped in her wings.
"Where did he go?"
"I don't know," Alan said. "Out."
"Is this what your family is like?"
"Yeah," Alan said. "This is what they're like."
"Are you going to go out, too?"
"Yeah."
"Fine," she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and
stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. "Tomorrow,
you cut these tomorrow!" she said, and her wings flared open, knocking
the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books.
Pages:
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436