30. Silas
Chapter 30
Silas
“Lunch!” my mother yells.
Richard squeals like a gutted pig, using my lap to launch off toward the door. I’d been reading to him from an old storybook, the one he carried out to the front door when I came home an hour ago. I groan, cupping my now aching balls as I watch my brothers stream out of my room for lunch.
My room is a bit of a misnomer. It hasn’t been mine for years now. Thomas, the eldest, moved in the same day I left for CA. Some of my old stuff is still here—certificates duct-taped to the walls, a few trophies stuck wherever there was a flat surface not covered in books. Although many of them have since disappeared. Most likely pawned, like my old computer.
I can’t fault my parents for selling whatever they could. They have a hard enough time keeping this saggy roof over my three little brothers’ heads. Feeding those three sods would put a dent in anyone’s coffer, even Knox’s.
Fuck, if it wasn’t for him, we’d have lost this tiny house years ago.
By the time I get down to the kitchen, there’s half a sandwich left for me. Richard and Seth are sitting on the floor in front of the black and white television, Thomas next to Pa on the two-seater couch…the only furniture in there that hasn’t been re-purposed from old produce crates.
“Here,” I tell Ma, handing her the PB and J sandwich that somehow survived the Miller termites.
She pushes the sandwich away. “Already eaten, pumpkin pie.”
“You had a whole pumpkin pie to yourself?” I tease. “Don’t let Tommy hear that.”
Ma chuckles, batting me away when I try and feed her the sandwich. Thankfully, she doesn’t embarrass either of us much longer, taking the bread from me and nibbling at it like she could have gone a week without eating.
She could. I’ve seen her last days between paychecks without a crumb passing her lips. Fuck knows how she looks after three kids and a fully grown man without passing out. I grab her bony shoulders and ease her into one of the rickety kitchen chairs, taking her place at the basin.
“How’s school?” Ma asks.
“Excellent.”
“Still managing with all those subjects you took?” She keeps her voice low so Pa won’t hear us from the living room. Although, when I crane to peek out the kitchen door, it looks like he’s passed out again.
“Of course, Ma.” I shrug, shoving my arms into the warm suds. “You know I’d have taken more if they let me.”
“Still don’t know how you got so damn smart,” Ma says. “Never even read to you when you were in my belly.”
Because she was too busy working at the shady motel in downtown Outbye. Thank God the doctor put her on bed rest, else she’d have worked herself to death.
“You let me go to the library whenever I wanted,” I tell her, rinsing a ladle before tossing it on the cracked plastic dry rack. “I lived in that place.”
We share a quiet chuckle, but we both know the public library was a sight better than the run-down trailer we lived in back then. Sometimes the librarians on duty would even give me some of their lunch.
These days, the Divine Radiance Church runs a soup kitchen just down the street from that library. Funded by Knox’s family, of course.
What would have happened if I’d met Knox sooner? Would Letty still be alive?
“Your friend’s brother still so sick?” Ma asks. She’s not dumb—not by a far shot—but she is forgetful. Anything that doesn’t involve the mine or her children, tends to slip her mind.
“Yeah, Ma, I told you. It’s chronic.”
“Like Letty.” Ma sighs deeply. “Sometimes I think I’ll go upstairs, and she’ll still be there. Reading in her chair, or?—”
A wet, hacking cough from the living room cuts her off. We’re both silent for a beat before I ask, “Has he been to the doctor?”
“Oh, you know how they are.” When I glance over my shoulder, Ma gives me a dismissive wave. She’s still eating that sandwich, like she’s making it last. “The waiting list?—”
“Not the mine’s doctor,” I snap. “The clinic in town.”
“Oh, pumpkin pie.” Ma slips the rest of the sandwich into her apron pocket. “You know your daddy doesn’t approve of those religious quacks.”
I slam a plate down on the dish rack too hard. It breaks clean in two, nearly slicing off my fucking finger. “Fuck,” I mutter, snatching a ratty dish towel from its peg near the basin and wrapping it around my spouting finger.
“Don’t you dare curse in my house!” Ma sputters, shock and anger warring on her bony features. “You’re not too old to have your mouth washed out, young man!”
“The fuck is that racket?” a voice booms from the living room.
Despite the fact that I’m twenty-fucking-one years old, that voice still sends me into a momentary panic. I glare at Ma, and she glares at me—both of us blaming the other for rousing Mr. Miller.
“Now look what you’ve gone and done,” she hisses, pushing past me to grab a bottle of cheap whiskey from the top of the kitchen cabinet.
“Really, Ma? It’s not even noon.”
“It’s cheaper than his medicine and it does the same job.” She sloshes a measure of whiskey in one of Thomas’s old kiddie cups—the bears dancing on the outside have long since faded to indistinguishable blotches—and rushes from the kitchen like a fucking tornado.
I almost think she’s going to abandon our conversation—maybe try and clean one of the three upstairs bedrooms while everyone’s downstairs, or fold laundry—but she comes back a few minutes later with a strip of clean fabric in her hand.
“Give,” she says, grabbing my wrist and unwinding the blood-soaked dishcloth from my finger. “How you gonna hold all those books if you chop off your hand?” she mutters angrily. “Gotta be more careful, pumpkin pie.”
I let her tend to my wound. It’s that or fight her, and I don’t have the energy.She’s always been imbued with supernatural strength. She’s tall, sure—only an inch shorter than me—but she’s too spindly to account for such strength.
Do the kids on this street still think she’s a witch? That was all the rage when I was young. The Black Witch, they’d call her. She helped the local undertaker with arranging low-cost funerals for the miners, and there sure were a lot of deaths back then. She was almost always dressed in black. The fact that she’d chase my brothers and me out of the house with her broom when we annoyed her only made things worse.
She rinses my finger under the faucet, then splashes some of Pa’s cheap whiskey over the wound. I don’t say a word, watching her work in silence. I might be imagining it, but her knuckles seem larger. Redder. I hope she’s not becoming arthritic. Work is the only thing she knows. She’d rather be dead than an invalid.
Ma winds the clean rag over my cut with the efficiency of a World War II field medic and then gives me a somewhat condescending pat on the arm. “That’ll do just fine.”
“So the money I sent you for the doctor...?” I ask while she’s still within whisper distance.
Ma breaks eye contact with me, fusses with her apron strings, looks about to take the rest of the sandwich out of her pocket and instead tucks a stray strand of gray hair back into her bun. “You know how it is, pumpkin pie. Your daddy said he was feeling better. He said to fill up the pantry instead of wasting it on that cult.”
I lay a hand on her shoulder. “Ma, he needs to see a proper doctor. You know the idiot at the mine just gives them painkillers and sends them home for a week.”
Ma opens her mouth to argue, flinty irritation in her flinty blue eyes, but I cut her off. “If he won’t go to the clinic, then I’ll pay for him to see someone out of state.”
“No, no, pumpkin pie.” She smiles grimly at me, patting my chest. “That money is for school.”
I clap a hand over my eyes, groaning loudly as she leaves the kitchen. Why can’t she wrap her head around the fact that I’m riding on a full fucking scholarship? Sure, there were fees and shit that weren’t covered, but what we couldn’t get waived, Knox found ways to pay for without his family getting wind of it. He’s got a bright future in money laundering ahead of him.
Richie waddles into the kitchen. I’m not even a little surprised that he’s dragging his storybook behind him. I lift him onto my hip, heading into the living room. Pa is awake, the plastic cup of whiskey empty beside him.
“You two conspiring behind m’ back again?” he says, eyes narrowing. He points a soot-encrusted fingernail at me. “Ain’t going to that fuckin’ cult, y’ hear me? They’ll never get a cent from me.”
I don’t bother arguing. I’ve met mules more amenable than him.
Would I still have come home if I’d known he’d be here? Probably not. It’s not as if he’s ever pleased to see me. And Ma could have gone another week between visits. All I’ve done is stir up a hornet’s nest.
I bob Richie on my hip, tickling his side until he’s giggling. Happiest kid in the house, this one. But only because he doesn’t know what a shitty life he has. Wait until he’s a few years older and he realizes what a crap hand he was dealt. Then he won’t be giggling anymore.
“Tell Ma I say bye,” I say to Thomas as I let Richard slide down my leg to the floor. “And read to your brother.”
“Now?” Thomas whines.
“Yes, now.”
Pa says nothing about me bossing around my brothers. He’s probably just glad he doesn’t have to do it. He grabs a grubby handkerchief from his pocket and starts coughing into it.
I leave before I can get into it with him again. This is the sixth time this year he’s gone on sick leave. The working conditions in Cinderhart’s coal mines are horrible. Workers spend twelve or more hours a day in moist, cold tunnels filled with coal dust. And all the mine does to protect them is to issue a new face mask once a month when they have the funds. Which, judging from the barely minimum wage they pay, is hardly ever. Most workers just wrap bandannas over their faces, and a lot are so used to the air down there that they don’t even bother.
Pa has caught pneumonia so many times in his life, I’ve lost count. If he wasn’t such a dickhead about going to the Divine Radiance Clinic, then he’d get the antibiotics he needs.
“I gotta go,” I say to no one in particular. I climb into Knox’s BMW X7 but I don’t start it immediately. I have to be at the clinic in fifteen minutes but it’s not as if there’s ever any traffic in this place.
So I take a minute to soak up the desolate wasteland this neighborhood has become. Rubbish lines the street. Broken appliances and wrecked cars pile up in yards. There’s even a dead cat a few yards away, flies buzzing around its stiff corpse. When the stink of cigarette comes through the AC, I look through the rear window and see Ma leaning against the outside of our house, one foot kicked up behind her as she pulls at a smoke.
That’s where the money went that I sent them. Lucky Strike cigarettes and cheap whiskey.
It’s sad, really. The only time she looks happy is when she’s sucking on the filter end of a cigarette.
Fuck this. I put the X7 into drive and get the hell out of Jackleg Valley as fast as the eight-cylinder engine can take me. I’m five minutes away from the clinic when a call from Knox comes through on the Bluetooth.
“Yeah?”
“Are you done with your visit?” he asks dryly.
“Fuck yes.”
“Good. I need you to run an errand for me.”
“Now? Why?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“But I have to be at the clinic in?—”
“I’ll handle it,” Knox says.
I laugh despite myself. “You’re going to?—?”
“I had easier ways to deal with her. You and Mason were the ones who said?—”
“Fuck, yes. Okay.” I huff out an annoyed breath as I change lanes and indicate to turn into a side street so I can make a U-turn. “Text me the details. Just make sure?—”
“I told you,” Knox says in a steely voice. “I got this.”