Josie and Jack Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pack on his dresser. “The truck is in better shape than Raeburn thinks.”
    He lit the cigarette and pitched the match out the window into the still water and rotting leaves in the gutter. I studied my bare toes. There was dirt in the crevices around my toenails.
    Finally Jack said, “I can’t take you everywhere,” and I said, “I know.”
     
    The next Monday, Kevin McNerny showed up at our doorstep at eight o’clock, as arranged. Standing on our porch, his face so hopeful, he looked alien and out of place. For an instant I panicked. I almost told him to turn around and go home. I almost told him to leave us alone. Letting him take even a single step into our house was unthinkable. This was our house; this was where we lived.
    Then he told me that my dress looked nice.
    “Thanks, it was my mother’s,” I said and let him in.
    The parlor was ours. Raeburn taught lessons there during the winter, when the light was a little better than in his study. Other than that he never used it. As I led Kevin in from the front hall, I could practically smell the curiosity coming off him in waves. And sure enough, even after the two of us were sitting on the dusty couch, he was still poking around the room with his eyes, inspecting and collecting everything that he saw. For a moment I let myself look through his eyes as if I didn’t see the room every day of my life: the fraying, cloth-covered books in the bookcase, the dingy floral wallpaper, the shelves full of odd things that we’d brought from elsewhere in the house. But then I thought, let him look. We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.
    When he finally looked back at me, he blushed and looked embarrassed. “I’ve never been in one of these old houses before,” he said. “My mom went on that historic homes thing last spring when my aunt was visiting, but I didn’t go. Do they all look like this?”
    “This is the only one I’ve ever been in,” I said.
    “Are you on the tour?”
    “We’re not really an open-to-the-public kind of family.”
    “No, I guess you’re not.” He smiled. He had a nice smile, with straight white teeth. Some of my hostility melted away. “Well, I bet that none of those houses have as much cool stuff in them as yours does, anyway. Where did it all come from?” He stood up and walked over to the bookcase and took down a tarantula the size of my head, sealed in glass and framed in wood.
    “My grandfather, mostly. That spider is older than both of us put together.”
    “Wow.” Kevin sounded awed. “Was he a collector?”
    “Sort of. He was a trader—he sold curios and things—and we ended up with some of the leftovers. I don’t really know anything else about him.”
    “He was a smuggler,” Jack said from the doorway, three bottles of beer dangling by their necks from one hand. “Used to ferry whiskey down from Canada during Prohibition. After that, I think he switched to art and artifacts.” He crossed the room and handed a beer to Kevin, who seemed delighted to get it.
    “That’s awesome,” Kevin said.
    “Is it true?” I asked Jack.
    “Nearly as I can figure. You like our house, Kevin?”
    “It’s great. Looks like it should be haunted. Is it?”
    “Only by us,” I said, and we all laughed.
    We were good that night. My job, Jack had told me before Kevin arrived, was to make the boy fall in love with me. By the time Kevin left, I think he was a little in love with both of us.
    “It’s great that you guys get along so well,” he said, a little drunkenly, as I walked him out to his father’s car. “But I guess you sort of have to, don’t you?”
    “He’s my brother.”
    “Yeah, but you should see me and my little sister.” He shook his head. “That kid drives me nuts. If we had to spend more than fifteen minutes a day together, neither of us would survive.”
    “I think it’s different with us,” I said, and he said, “I think it is, too.”
    When he was gone, Jack and I sat together in the parlor