Bloodroot Read Online Free PDF Page B

the curb outside the Red Lion, the emerald neon of the bar’s Budweiser shamrock washing over the car’s gleaming black hood, gutter gravel crunching under the fat tires. He kept the engine running. Danny turned in his seat.
    “I mean, this was the original plan, right?”
    “Works for me,” I said.
    We hadn’t even discussed where we were going; Danny had no doubt planned the whole thing. Danny and I climbed out, careful not to catch the door on the high curb. Al stayed in the front seat, his cell phone open in his right hand, the neon striping his lap. He was reading a text message, brows knit, bottom lip puffed out.
    “Al, you coming in?” I asked, walking around the front of the car to his window.
    He snapped shut the phone, thinking hard about whatever he’d read. “Nah. I got a girl I gotta go see. I’ll catch up.”
    “Thanks for the ride,” I said.
    Al put the car into drive, nearly running over my feet as he pulled away. Danny stood outside the pub.
    “Used to be,” I said, walking over to him, “you couldn’t shut that kid up.”
    “That girl’s got him on a short leash,” Danny said. “Anyway, Al never could hold more than one idea in his head at a time. A girl takes up all the room he has. How about that beer?”
    He grabbed the brass door handle and pulled. Blurry conversations muddled under Shane McGowan’s singing drifted past us and over the street. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
    I threw a soft elbow into Danny’s midsection as I passed him. He pretended it hurt.
    Inside, the voices and the music got louder. Flushed, heavy-lidded faces rotated in our direction, their mouths still talking in the other direction. Danny pointed out a booth in a back corner, then went to the bar for drinks. I slipped through several sets of hard shoulders and dropped into the booth, sliding into the corner. Waiting for Danny, I picked at the old cigarette burns in the green plastic of the bench and watched the door, hoping our folks would walk in. It was a foolish thought, founded on nothing. I’d been here with Dad a couple times, but Danny had never been with us. Dad and I had talked about him here, though. Maybe that was it.
    What was the rush? If Danny really was on the mend, we’d have our reunion eventually. If Danny had kicked junk for good, there was no longer a time bomb ticking underneath our family. Then I thought of our mother. The bomb ticked on, just with someone else holding it now. And there was no defusing Alzheimer’s; it didn’t matter what wire you clipped. There was no kicking it, either.
    Danny set a draft Guinness in front of me and sat on the other side of the booth. All he’d gotten for himself was a tall club soda with lime. I decided to hold back on the news about Mom, at least for the night. I didn’t want Danny and me starting over with the taste of bad news in our mouths.
    “Totally clean and sober?” I asked.
    “I haven’t done heroin in over a year,” he said. “Nothing else, either, no weed, no pills, no coke, no nothing.”
    I turned the pint glass round and round on the table. I should’ve asked for a Coke. “I’m waiting for it to settle.”
    “Go ahead,” Danny said. “No worries.”
    “You sure? I don’t want to fuck anything up.”
    “Nobody can fuck me up but me,” Danny said. He sucked down half his soda water. “I have a few drinks now and then, but nothing more than that.” He tilted back the glass, sliding some ice into his mouth. “I’m not supposed to, technically, but considering where I’ve been, I figure I’m doing pretty well.”
    I drank my beer, licking the foam off my top lip. “Where have you been?”
    “No place that matters, but lots of places, I guess,” Danny said. “Nowhere I wanna go back to.”
    “How’d you get back here then?” I asked. “From wherever you were.”
    “I got a ride,” Danny said.
    “C’mon, Danny, not to my house, not here here. You know what I mean.”
    “I got