Family and Other Accidents Read Online Free PDF Page A

and still get back in time.”
    â€œCall me tomorrow. Maybe things will be different.” And then she’s gone.
    On his way back to his own room, Connor pauses outside Jack’s door, listens to the muffled sounds—Jack hacking, saying something about South Euclid; the reporter’s soft laughter; rustling that might be sheets or clothes or skin. Connor squats, resting his head against the wood to listen. Things become almost rhythmic—the reporter’s small moans; Jack’s voice gentle, asking if everything is okay, if there’s anything he can do. Closing his eyes, Connor strains to hear the difference between what’s going on inside and what happened in his room.
    Then everything is quite, then shuffling, then the door opens and Brenda Starr stumbles over him, her bare feet cold against his calf. Yelping, she scurries down the hall. Too stunned to move, Connor just sits there.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Jack races out of the bedroom in undershorts and a crumpled blue button-down. Caterpillar eyebrows raised with panic, he kneels next to his brother. “Are you sick?”
    â€œNo.”
    Breathing wet and heavy, Jack sighs, sits back on his ankles. “Then why are you outside my door in your underwear?”
    Brenda Starr makes brief eye contact—her eyes aren’t darty and unfocused anymore. Gone is the light laugh that made her beautiful; she’s one more girl in one more of Jack’s T-shirts. Turning away, she looks at the white wall.
    In unison Connor and Jack notice the used condom crusting in Connor’s left hand, and Jack’s face twists in a way Connor is pretty sure he’ll remember the rest of his life—the way people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot.
    â€œJesus, what is with you?” Jack asks as Connor closes his hand and pulls knees to his chest. “I feel like shit. I’m having the worst week at work”—he rolls his eyes to the reporter—“do you have to have this meltdown right now?”
    Jack looks sick and sallow, his skin looser than that of a normal twenty-seven-year-old. Pebbled guilt in Connor’s rib cage expands to a grapefruit, because Jack probably didn’t want to live in Ohio and do monumentally boring things in their father’s law firm where he has worked two years and senior partners still call him “Reed’s kid.” Because Connor hasn’t done anything he promised himself he would do at the repair shop after the accident. Because Brenda Starr’s dislike radiates like gamma rays. Because Jenny says “soda” instead of “pop” and deserved better.
    â€œI had sex with Jenny,” he finally says, because that might give some sense of purpose to Jack’s sacrifices. But Jack looks at him, blank as oatmeal, things going on behind his black eyes that Connor can’t read.
    Sighing again, Jack reaches out and lays his palm on top of Connor’s fist. “You still need to throw that away,” he says.
    The two of them don’t have the kind of relationship where they touch often, and in this brief exchange of flesh on flesh, Connor thinks he understands, a little, about the girls who come in and out of Jack’s life like cheap pens. About how those girls mean something to Jack at the time. About how they feel when they’re with him or sleeping smashed against his side afterward.
    â€œGo to bed, kid,” Jack says, and then he’s up, taking Brenda Starr’s hand, shaking his head, and inventing an explanation that makes more sense than the truth as he shows her to whatever it was she needed in the bathroom. Connor goes back to his bedroom and folds the condom in a piece of notebook paper on his desk. Kennedy stares at him with disapproval.
    â€œWhat?” Connor asks.
    The poster says nothing.
    Picking up the phone, Connor dials Jenny’s number, but hangs up when her mother answers—groggy and mad.