The Best Thing for You Read Online Free PDF

lawyer here, now, for this. Although I guess they’ll tell us if we need one?”
    Liam smiles – faintly, sad. “So trusting.”
    The doorbell rings again. “They can’t take him anywhere without us, can they?”
    He touches his jaw. I feel it against my own fingertips: sandpaper. “I don’t know.”
    We answer the door together. The officer is a Chinese woman named Veronica Stevens. We take her into the dining room and introduce her to Ty, who has this moment appeared in socks and shoes, hair combed, T-shirt tucked into his pants. Liam explains about the “bizarre scene” with the Parmenters the night before. “So we’ve been expecting someone since last night,” Liam says. “Of course, we’re glad you’re doing your job.”
    “Uh-huh,” she says.
    While she questions Ty, I try to imagine her aiming a gun. She’s a solid little thing, good skin, looks calm. She’s probably a crack shot. “What was that web site?” she’s asking.
    “What?” Ty says.
    Somewhere nearby a lawn mower starts up. She pushes a pen and a slip of paper across the table to him. “Why don’t you write it down for me, okay, buddy?”
    Flushing a little, he writes, folds the paper, and hands it back to her. She opens it, reads it, and tucks it in her notebook. “All right then!” she says.
    We all stand up.
    “Here’s my card,” she says. “You might want to get in touch with us again. We might want to get in touch with you.”
    “Yeah?” Liam says.
    “Yeah, probably.” We see her to the door. “Beautiful day!”
    “It’s a good one,” Liam says.
    “We’re going to need him to come in for a formal statement. We’re doing pretty good so far, though. Hey, is that a bay laurel?”
    I say, “Yes, it is.”
    “I’m trying to grow one of those,” she says.
    Next door, Brill is mowing and watching us. The three of us watch Veronica Stevens get into her car and drive away. No one waves. Brill stands there idling, without the toupée he wears to the investment firm where he works, chewing some kind of little cigar. When she’s gone, he cuts the motor. “You folks have a break-in?”
    “Nothing like that,” Liam says.
    “Some kind of trouble?”
    “Isn’t your grass already pretty short for mowing?”
    “Don’t get snotty with me, Mick.” Brill has already complained to us twice about the noise from the landscapers, whereas I’ve sunk bamboo kebab skewers amongst the delphs to stop his cats shitting in my beds, so this is a pretty typical exchange. Still. “That brat of yours been shoplifting?”
    “Ignore.” I pull Liam inside, closing the door.
    “Shoplifting, yeah, shoplifting,” Liam says.

    “You need anything?”
    High noon and Liam is back in the black room with his movie. I’m key-fingered, key-twirling, ready to take Ty on our annual last-minute school-shopping excursion. Normal is how I’m going to act, I’ve decided. Frozen yogurt, maybe a T-shirt for me; binders, jeans, socks, diskettes, dividers, sweaters, and what-all for him. Without looking at me Liam says, “Colombian Dark Roast and a quarter of espresso.”
    “Coffee is the rust of the human body,” I tell him. “It eats out your insides.”
    He doesn’t smile, instead looks moody, worried. I decide it’s the talking- to we gave Ty after Officer Stevens left. Primarilywe dealt with the not coming forward after it was reported on TV , although we also touched on Jason-avoidance at school and elsewhere. “Yeah, I know,” Ty said humbly. While I tactfully went upstairs to make the beds, Liam riffed a little on the exploitation of women in the context of pornographic web sites, and then we were done. I came back down, hugged him, and we sent him off for half an hour of recuperative MuchMusic so we could debrief before shopping.
    “Just don’t be too nice to him,” Liam says now. “We want him to learn a lesson from this.”
    “I’ll buy him ugly clothes. I’ll push him into walls and stuff, in the stores.” But he still