Blood Relations Read Online Free PDF Page A

muttered, slouching lower in the bed.
    “Ya.” He laughed. “I hear changing your spots can be a pretty tricky operation.”
    He had me beat. I lay there without answering.
    “Who’s Felina?” Sully pressed.
    “She’s my mother ,” the cold voice growled from the doorway.
    Sully stood frozen, staring.
    Toy stared back. With his arms over his head, his hands gripping the door frame above, he looked all spread wide, staring down on Sully, bearing down on him. Like a meal. The hawk and the squirrel.
    “Holy smokes,” I said, and leaped out of bed. My knees buckled and I got intensely dizzy, so I had to sit back down. Fell down, really, while the blood got back to all the needy places. “Oh god. Ouch. Oh god.”
    Toy walked into the room. He walked right to Sully, getting in real close, aggressive close, uncomfortable close. Ready to talk, ready to listen to anything having to do with the last time they saw each other. He made it so that, with Toy’s chest in his face, Sully had to do something.
    Sully’s face turned red, his eyes turned down. “Glad to see you got away okay,” he mumbled.
    “Ya, thanks a bunch,” Toy responded.
    Sully left without a word.
    When Sully left he grunted at something in the shadow of the hallway. Then Toy’s other surprise stepped into the room. Evelyn.
    “Jesus, this is a damn party,” I said, excited and silly like a kid. “Where’ve you been, Toy?”
    Toy was not at all excited or silly. “Where’ve you been?”
    “The disabled list,” I joked, still failing to read the mood of the room. “Evelyn, love, I knew you’d come back to me.”
    She shook her head and flared her nostrils in disgust as she looked me all over. “You know, you got a boca loca, boy. Every time I see you, you say something moronic to me.”
    “I’m stupid with love,” I moaned.
    “You’re stupid with something , that’s for sure.”
    I laughed, feeling it was a compliment of some kind, then looked up to Toy for him to share it with me. Toy had this way of showing his expression even while hiding most of it under his hat. And he was showing me something angry now.
    “So where you been?” I chirped. “You look good.”
    “I was on a vacation.”
    “Excellent. Where’d ya go?”
    “None of your business.”
    “Maybe we picked a bad time, Toy,” Evelyn said. “We’ll see him at school next week.”
    Without thinking, I reached for my pills. Toy snatched the bottle out of my hand and read the label.
    “What’s your problem?” Toy demanded.
    I hate it when people ask me that. “Maybe she’s right,” I said. “Maybe you should go now.”
    “Do you know that it smells in here?” He leaned down into my face. “It smells like a toilet. Are you aware of that?”
    “Well, I wasn’t, but thank—”
    “Jesus, Mick, are you sick? Where is everybody?” He stopped, reached down on the floor, and picked up a brown half-moon-shaped something. “Jesus Christ, is this a hamburger? Isn’t anyone taking care of you?”
    “I’m not sick.” Suddenly I felt defensive, angry. “They’re all out working right now. Shoppin’, maybe. My mother brings me in food. The other night my father asked me, from the other side of the door, if I wanted him to wheel in the TV for a couple of hours. So you see I’m taken good care of, thank you very much.”
    Maybe that was a good thing to tell him, because when I said it he stopped picking on me. He just sighed and slapped his thighs loudly with his hands.
    “You really don’t look well, Mick,” Evelyn said, brushing past Toy. She came close and raised my chin with two fingers. She was so warm, not that she had any special feeling for me, but because she was one of those people who cannot ignore hurt things—even if she does try to make exceptions. She was so beautiful, she made me want to hurt myself.
    “Can I have my pills back?” I said flatly to Toy.
    He reached right over Evelyn and grabbed me. With his big hand he seized me by the neck,