Fresh Kills Read Online Free PDF

Old enough to remember, if I tried.

    I concentrated. We’d been to Coney Island. I thought so anyway, I thought someone told me about it once, but I couldn’t recall anything specific. “I remember that ugly shirt the old man’s wearing.”

    “Do you?” she asked. “From that day? Or from looking at these pictures with Mom? Or from her cleaning out the closet? Or do you just think you remember it?”

    She pushed another photo at me. Mom and I are holding hands, running toward the camera through a field of short dead grass. We’re both laughing. I’m going on four years old. Autumn, judging by my mother’s sweater and the yellow grass. Just me and my mother. She is thin and young. Red-cheeked. Beautiful.

    “Tell me about that one,” Julia said. I couldn’t. I didn’t remember a thing about it. That moment, wherever it was, may as well have never happened.

    I pushed up from the table. “Julia, I don’t know. What’s the difference? So we don’t remember. Big deal. I don’t remember my first day of school. I don’t remember the first book I read. I don’t even remember the first day of high school. I barely remember the day I met Molly.” Julia looked up at me, confusion in her face. I threw the picture on the table. “These are just . . . this is just the highlight reel, the wish list. It wasn’t like this and you know it. It wasn’t toy horses and beaches and sunny fields.” I took a big hit of beer. “There’s plenty I do remember, like bruises and broken furniture. I don’t need any pictures to remember what he was like.”

    “It wasn’t all misery, either.” She wiped her eyes. “You know why I’m crying?”

    “Not for the old man, I hope.” I flicked my cigarette ashes on the kitchen floor.

    “Don’t you let him cause you one more single moment of sadness.”

    “Are you going to answer my question?”

    I blew out a plume of smoke. There were a million reasons for her to be crying. Because whatever misguided hope she’d held of making him a decent father died on that sidewalk. Because all that remained of her family now was me and some grainy, yellowing photos. Because she grew up watching her old man beat her mother and her big brother. Would it have been easier on her, I wondered, if he had hit her, too? I drained more beer from the bottle.

    “Fucked if I know,” I said.

    “I’m crying for me,” she said. “I don’t miss him. I never realized it until now, but I haven’t missed him for years. I don’t know who he is, this man in this awful shirt. I feel like I never knew him. Isn’t that sad? My father, the man our mother loved for most of her life, was shot dead in the street and all I feel is numb.” She reached out and grabbed my hands, squeezing hard. “What kind of daughter does that make me?”

    “You were a better daughter than he ever deserved,” I said. “And you know it. You tried as hard as you could. You wrote, you called. You tried.”

    “I did those things because I was supposed to, because that’s what daughters do,” she said. “Because Mom would’ve wanted me to. It wasn’t because I missed him.”

    “It’s not your fault he never answered,” I said. “It was more than I ever did.”

    “What kind of sister am I, John? Tell me the truth.”

    “You’re a fine sister,” I said. “The best a man could hope for. You’re too hard on yourself, and too forgiving of the old man, like always. When will you learn not to care anymore?”

    “You care,” she said.

    “The hell I do.”

    “Sure you do, Junior,” she said. “If I still know you at all, you’re feeling a whole world of things, maybe none of them good, but at least you feel something. I don’t. I can’t. I can’t feel anything. It doesn’t matter to me that Dad is dead, that neither of us will ever see him again.”

    “Then why are you even here?” I asked. “I’m only here because of you. Why didn’t you stay in Boston and go on with your life? You