No Place Like Home Read Online Free PDF

take it you had to bail him out of jail in the wee hours of the morning?”
    “Oh, it’s good this time.” I ticked off the violations on my fingers. “They were tagging a billboard over on Fourth Street when a cop spied them.”
    Michael raised his eyebrows.
    “Wait,” I said. “It gets better. Being a fairly bright pair of idiots, they had an escape plan in place. They scrambled down from the sign—drunk, of course—”
    “Naturally.”
    “—and got in Justin’s car to outrun the cop.” It made me nauseated to imagine what might have happened.
    “Obviously they were not successful in their flight.” A tiny smile quirked the corner of Michael’s mouth.
    “No. Getting caught with spray paint cans in hand, drunk, after curfew wasn’t enough. They had to add eluding the police.” Watching him make his way through the éclair, I regretted that I’d resisted buying a cruller for myself. “What is
wrong
with him?”
    “Ah, it’s not that bad. He’s seventeen, that’s all. In the long run, you know he’ll be all right.”
    A pang went through my chest. “I’m really not that sure right now. He’s got no strength of character. He’s too charming, he’s too good looking, and he’s too much his father’s child.”
    Michael thought about that as he licked some custard off his thumb. “All true but the last bit. He’s not really like Billy. He’s more like you.”
    It wasn’t all that comforting, to tell you the truth. It’s not like I have a record of outstanding successes. “I wish my father would pay attention to him. I don’t care anymore if he forgives me, but he could do a lot for Shane.”
    Michael looked at me. No words. He didn’t approve of my father, but only because he didn’t understand him. Michael loved me, and hated that I cared so much that my father has not spoken to me in twenty years, a reality that had grown more excruciating with every passing day. “You can’t judge everybody by the way your father was, Michael.”
    “Is that what I’m doing?”
    I shrugged. Relented. “No.”
    “Truth is, darlin’, I can’t really think of anything your father and my daddy would have had in common. ‘Cept rotten children.” He winked, a shadow of his former self.
    We sat in the quiet of the gathering heat, not talking. I propped my feet on the rail and listened to Shane’s music on the CD player inside—something new and alternative in a minor key. It expressed remorse, and I had to smile. The kid has great taste in music, actually, loves everything from Celtic to jazz, Bach to metal in addition to his beloved, blasting rock ’n’ roll.
    Music. Would it save him or kill him? Did so many musicians self-destruct because the music failed them or did self-destructive people end up in music? A familiar knot of panic tied itself in my gut.
    “Have you heard from your father lately?” I asked, taking my mind from the immediate worry.
    “Not for six or eight months. He was working in Indiana. Asking for money in a roundabout way.” He gave me a bitter smile. “Didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t have any left.”
    “Sorry.”
    A lift of one bone-thin shoulder. “Not your fault.”
    “I think you need to call him, Michael. You need to see him.”
    Slowly he examined the last of the éclair, then ate it. “We been through this, darlin’. No point in breaking his heart just yet.”
    I sighed. There was no way to
make
Michael do anything he didn’t want to do, and he’d somehow made up his mind to spare his father the pain of his eldest son’s lingering illness.
    Michael’s parents had been ordinary, blue-collar southern people, salt of the earth as they say, until they got together. And they turned from normal to completely abnormal, alternately obsessed with lust for each other or caught in a spiral of jealousy and revenge that had ultimately ended with Michael’s father in prison.
    Where my life had been as stable and ordinary as, well . . . pie, Michael’s