Page 33 of Skeletons in the Closet

Submitting, I sat back down. Birdie was right. Nana’s health was more important than my own.

Birdie brought two plates. She had cut Nana’s into bite-sized pieces. I set up the TV tray and pushed it close to the rocking chair so Nana could reach it, then encouraged her to eat. It was a battle. Nana put her fork down between every bite and was hard-pressed to pick it up again.

I shoveled roast beef, mashed potatoes smothered with gravy, and steamed carrots into my mouth as fast as possible, knowing it was impolite but also knowing the longer I hung around, the higher the chance of things going south.

Nana ate half of what Birdie served before giving up altogether. When I tried to feed her another bite, she waved me away. “I can feed myself. I’m full up now. Leave me be, Boone. I want tea and those shortbread biscuits you always buy. They’re my favorite.”

“Okay, Nana. I’ll tell Birdie.”

But before I could relay the message, Mom appeared in the doorway like an apparition. Her skin was pale, and the shadows circling her eyes made her look like a corpse. Even her hair was scraggly and limp like it had given up at vibrance a decade ago. She was a petite woman, made smaller by a life living under my father’s thumb. The vacant look in her gray eyes had been there since I was a boy, and it aged her, making her look decades older than her fifty-five years.

I’d long ago given up feeling sorry for her, and maybe that made me a horrible person, but my therapist had said numerous times I needed to know when to cut my losses.

Eye shade aside, Mom and I looked nothing alike. The Krause genes dominated everything, and it was the bane of my existence. I didn’t mind being told how much I looked like Boone, but seeing any hints of my father when I looked in themirror made me want to punch out the glass—and I’d done that a time or two.

“Hey, Mom.” My teeth hurt from clenching. My bones ached from holding a rigid stance.

“Your father wants to see you.”

“I’m on my way out. Another time.”

Mom blinked and stared as though unsure how to process the response, and I knew what would happen if she carried that message upstairs to Dad. Fuck my life.

Nana patted my arm. “Boone, you go deal with him. I won’t have him hurting that boy.”

But Leroy Krause had hurt that boy time and again, and Boone, Nana, and my mother had not been able to stop him.

“I’ll be up in a second,” I told my mother.

She left, and I said goodbye to Nana, knowing I’d be in no mood to continue our visit afterward. We didn’t hug—I didn’t know how, and unless she forced me into her arms like she had when I was a kid, I wasn’t one to initiate something that made me uncomfortable—but I bent so she could kiss my cheek with her dry lips. Nana squeezed my hand with her waning strength before letting go.

I said goodbye to Birdie, whose disdainful look told me exactly how she felt about the situation, and headed upstairs.

Mom was in the kitchen, cooking. Dad was in the living room, drunk off his ass. The fumes wafted off his skin into the air. Considering he’d gotten home within the hour, I figured he must have arrived intoxicated. The handful of empty bottles gathered at his feet weren’t near enough to make him drunk. He held a fresh bottle on his knee. In nothing more than boxers, his beer gut and silver chest hair were on display. Boone had taken care of himself and was a sturdy man until the day his heart gave up. Dad was a disgusting mess, overweight and bitter with the world.

Several times as a patrol officer, I’d put a bug in coworkers’ ears about monitoring him for drunk driving, but nothing had come of it. It would have been heavenly to lock the fucker up and throw away the key, but I was never lucky where Leroy Krause was concerned.

Dad had worked for the pipe fitters union since he was in his twenties. At sixty, he was due to retire but kept plugging along. The work could be labor-intensive, but Dad had a lazy streak. He’d been at it enough years that he’d learned to play the system. Mostly, he ensured he always had an apprentice to do the grunt work.

With one arm slung over the back of the couch, Dad channel surfed, never landing on anything long enough to take it in. I stared at the back of his head for a minute, a souring sensation in my gut advising me to leave. I wasn’t at his beck and call. I didn’t owe him anything.

In all likelihood, my mother would suffer the consequences regardless. She always had, and yet she had always stayed.

“What do you want?” I grumbled, not taking my eyes off the old man. The blood inside my veins boiled. Muscles twitching, I waited at attention for something to happen. Somethingalwayshappened.

Leroy didn’t turn around when he spoke. “If you park out front of my house again, I’ll slice your fucking tires.”

“You don’t own the street. I can park where I please.”

“Are you giving me lip?”

“I’m stating a fact.”

“Sounds like lip.”

“Is that all you wanted?”

“No.”

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