Mystic River Read Online Free PDF Page A

tomorrow—unless they gave everyone a day off from school, too, to celebrate Dave’s return—and he’d want to ask her, but he wouldn’t.
    Jimmy took his hot dog and sat down on the curb across from Dave’s house to eat it. When he was about halfway through the dog, one of the shades rolled up and he saw Dave standing in the window, staring down at him. Jimmy held up his half-eaten hot dog in recognition, but Dave didn’t acknowledge him, even when he tried a second time. Dave just stared. He stared at Jimmy, and even though Jimmy couldn’t see his eyes, he could sense blankness in them. Blankness, and blame.
    Jimmy’s mother sat down beside him on the curb, and Dave stepped away from the window. Jimmy’s mother was a small, thin woman with the palest hair. For someone so thin, she moved as if she carried stacks of brick on each shoulder, and she sighed a lot and in such a way that Jimmy wasn’t positive she knew the sound was coming out of her. He would look at pictures of her that had been taken before she’d become pregnant with him, and she looked a lot less thin and so much younger, like a teenage girl (which, when he did the math, was exactly what she’d been). Her face was rounder in the pictures, with no lines by the eyes or on the forehead, and she had this beautiful, full smile that seemed just slightly frightened, or maybe curious, Jimmy could never tell for sure. His father had told him a thousand times that Jimmy had almost killed her coming out, that she’d bled and bled until the doctors were worried she might never stop bleeding. It had wiped her out, his father had said. And, of course, there would be no more babies. No one wanted to go through that again.
    She put her hand on Jimmy’s knee and said, “How you doing, G.I. Joe?” His mother was always calling him by different nicknames, often made up on the spot, Jimmy half the time not knowing who the name referred to.
    He shrugged. “You know.”
    “You didn’t say anything to Dave.”
    “You wouldn’t let me move, Ma.”
    His mother lifted her hand back off his knee and huggedherself in the chill that was deepening with the dark. “I meant after. When he was still outside.”
    “I’ll see him tomorrow in school.”
    Her mother fished in the pocket of her jeans for her Kents and lit one, blew the smoke out in a rush. “I don’t think he’ll be going in tomorrow.”
    Jimmy finished his hot dog. “Well, soon, then. Right?”
    His mother nodded and blew some more smoke out of her mouth. She cupped her elbow in her hand and smoked and looked up at Dave’s windows. “How was school today?” she said, though she didn’t seem real interested in an answer.
    Jimmy shrugged. “Okay.”
    “I met that teacher of yours. She’s cute.”
    Jimmy didn’t say anything.
    “Real cute,” his mother repeated into a gray ribbon of exhaled smoke.
    Jimmy still didn’t say anything. Most of the time he didn’t know what to say to his parents. His mother was worn out so much. She stared off at places Jimmy couldn’t see and smoked her cigarettes, and half the time didn’t hear him until he’d repeated himself a couple times. His father was pissed off usually, and even when he wasn’t and could be kind of fun, Jimmy would know that he could turn into a pissed-off drunk guy any second, give Jimmy a whack for saying something he might have laughed at half an hour before. And he knew that no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, he had both his father and mother inside of him—his mother’s long silences and his father’s sudden fits of rage.
    When Jimmy wasn’t wondering what it would be like to be Miss Powell’s boyfriend, he sometimes wondered what it would be like to be her son.
    His mother was looking at him now, her cigarette held up by her ear, her eyes small and searching.
    “What?” he said, and gave her an embarrassed smile.
    “You got a great smile, Cassius Clay.” She smiled back at him.
    “Yeah?”
    “Oh, yeah.