Among the Missing Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t understand it. When the bird croaked, “Smell my feet,” didn’t Tobe make the same associations that she did? Didn’t he cringe? Didn’t he have the same doubts?
    Apparently not. She tried to make eye contact with him, to plead her case in an exchange of gazes, but he would have none of it. He smirked into his hand, as if he were one of the children.
    And maybe she was overreacting. A parrot! It was such a minor thing, wasn’t it? Perhaps not worth bringing up, not worth its potential for argument. He stretched out in bed beside her and she continued to read her book, aware of the heaviness emanating from him, aware that his mind was going over and over some detail once again, retracing it, pacing around its circumference. In the past few months, it had become increasingly difficult to read him—his mood shifts, his reactions, his silences.
    Once, shortly after the trial had concluded, she had tried to talk to him about it. “It’s not your fault,” she had told him. “You did the best you could.”
    She had been surprised at the way his eyes had narrowed, by the flare of anger, of pure scorn, which had never before been directed at her. “Oh, really?” he said acidly. “Whose fault is it, then? That an innocent man went to prison?” He glared at her, witheringly, and she took a step back. “Listen, Cheryl,” he’d said. “You might not understand this, but this is my brotherwe’re talking about. My little brother. Greeting card sentiments are not a fucking comfort to me.” And he’d turned and walked away from her.
    He’d later apologized, of course. “Don’t ever talk to me that way again,” she’d said, “I won’t stand for it.” And he agreed, nodding vigorously, he had been out of line, he was under a lot of stress and had taken it out on her. But in truth, an unspoken rift had remained between them in the months since. There was something about him, she thought, that she didn’t recognize, something she hadn’t seen before.
    Cheryl had always tried to avoid the subject of Tobe’s brothers. He was close to them, and she respected that. Both of Tobe’s parents had died before Cheryl met him—the mother of breast cancer when Tobe was sixteen, the father a little more than a decade later, of cirrhosis—and this had knit the four boys together. They were close in an old-fashioned way, like brothers in Westerns or gangster films, touching in a way, though when she had first met them she never imagined what it would be like once they became fixtures in her life.
    In the beginning, she had liked the idea of moving back to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Tobe had grown up. The state, and the way Tobe had described it, had seemed romantic to her. He had come back to set up a small law office, with his specialty in family court. She had a degree in educational administration, and was able, without much trouble, to find a job as a guidance counselor at a local high school.
    It had seemed like a good plan at the time. Her own family was scattered: a sister in Vancouver; a half sister in Chicago,where Cheryl had grown up; her father, in Florida, was remarried to a woman about Cheryl’s age and had a four-year-old son, whom she could hardly think of as a brother; her mother, now divorced for a third time, lived alone on a houseboat near San Diego. She rarely saw or spoke to any of them, and the truth was that when they’d first moved to Cheyenne, she had been captivated by the notion of a kind of homely happiness—family and neighbors and garden, all the mundane middle-class clichés, she knew, but it had secretly thrilled her. They had been happy for quite a while. It was true that she found Tobe’s family a little backward. But at the time, they had seemed like mere curiosities, who made sweet, smart Tobe even sweeter and smarter, to have grown up in such an environment.
    She thought of this again as the usual Friday night family gathering convened at their house, now sans Wendell, now