Brothers and Bones Read Online Free PDF

I was a happy one. Unhappier accidents crouched on the horizon, waiting to pounce. One day thirty years ago, when I was a six-year-old kid whose biggest concern was whether I’d get the bike I wanted for my birthday, my parents were killed by—believe it or not—an empty fried chicken bucket. Both sad and ridiculous, I know. They were driving home from a dinner party when the teenaged passenger in the car in front of them tossed an empty fried chicken bucket out his window. The cops said the cars were doing about sixty at the time, the bucket bounced off my parents’ windshield, and my father lost control of the car. They hit a guardrail, flipped, and rolled along the highway. My parents were dead before the car came to a stop. In the span of eight seconds, their lives were over and ours would never be the same again.
    As soon as he turned eighteen, just ten months later, Jake rescued me from my foster home, where I was not mistreated but where I was far from happy. And he raised me. He made sure the bulk of the money we received from our parents’ insurance policies went toward my care. And his personal life suffered. He had no time to spend with his friends, so they drifted away. He had no spare time or money to date. When he should have been living it up, an eighteen-year-old with the world by the balls, he was playing father, mother, and big brother to me. He put the insurance money away, used it only when he had to for my needs, and supplemented it by pumping gas full-time at a Shell station, taking overtime when he could get it.
    It wasn’t easy for him. I think it got to him at times, though he never wanted me to know it. Now and then I’d see him looking different somehow, in a way I didn’t fully understand at my age. It was probably anxiety, maybe about me, maybe about money. Perhaps he was chafing under the burden of responsibility that had fallen on him so unfairly, so much more heavily than on his peers. But when I’d catch him looking that way and ask him if he was all right, he’d say, “I’m just Jake.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time but his smile was enough to send me off happily. When I was in high school, I learned that in the jazz age of the 1920s, if something was “jake” it meant it was fine, just great. Maybe I read it in The Great Gatsby . Anyway, in later years, my standard greeting to my brother after any kind of extended absence was, “How are you?” and he’d always answer, “I’m just Jake.”
    But, as I said, there were times when I was very young when he seemed to be a little overwhelmed by our circumstances, though he didn’t want me to know that. And, of course, I didn’t realize—and therefore didn’t appreciate—his sacrifices at the time. I mouthed off, acted bratty, complained about the things he didn’t do for me or give me, until I grew up a little—okay, a lot. But eventually, after a few years, I understood. And then I raised him up into the place he’d earned on the pedestal I created for him.
    He went to night school, majored in journalism, and, even though he only went to a community college, he landed a job at the Boston Beacon , the third-largest newspaper in the city, writing small stories. He worked hard, took whatever assignments he could get, and sharpened his skills. Over time, he made some contacts of his own, earned their trust, and turned them into confidential sources. Eventually he became a pretty good investigative journalist. He never broke the really big story, but he made a small name for himself. And that was enough for him, I think.
    But I still wonder what he could have accomplished if it hadn’t been for that phone call fate had sent my brother’s way. More importantly, I think about all the times we would have shared but for that night thirteen long years ago. I was studying for a tort law exam at Northeastern University Law School at two in the morning when two policemen paid me a visit. The presence of cops at your