The Birth of Bane Read Online Free PDF Page B

business.
    Anyhow, I
digress.
    We sat in his
study, all four us, fidgeting and hungry until he realized he could
make a sizable profit off the house on the hill and then, and only
then, did he stand and say, “Ok, we’ll move.”
    Of course, he
couldn’t say just it and still be the Leonard Favor we all knew.
There was always one more stipulation to be mandated and on that
day there was no exception to that unsaid rule.
    “ But,” he began,
“no one gets attached to the house. We’re only going to stay there
until the remodeling is completed. When it is done, were going to
put it up for sale. We’ll be out of there faster than any of you
can blink. Do you understand?” He looked directly at my mom.
“Pillar?”
    Silence.
    We kids shared
uncaring glances, shrugging our shoulders. We could’ve cared less.
We were hungry. That was all that mattered to us.
    My mother though
had a gleam in the corner of her eye, but stayed otherwise silent.
I would’ve missed it, if she hadn’t let it slip into a squint, a
slight pinching about the eyes. It could’ve been construed as
innocuous, but coupled with that gleam, it was anything but. She
had glared at him. It was the first time I had ever seen her do
anything like it when the subject of her ire was my father. This
wasn’t her. She was always so subdued and soft-spoken. Where had
this newfound wellspring of backbone come from?
    He had stayed
quiet for a bit as well. Then seemed to realize we were all staring
back at him. He waved his hands at us. “Get the hell out of here!
You’re crowding me!”
    Well, what the
fuck, you were the one that held us hostage in the first place!
Shit, make up your freakin’ mind, I thought as I rushed out of the room, feeling like I’d just
been released from prison.
    Th at was how things were
with my dad – weird.
     
    *****
     
    They were about
to get even weirder.
     
    *****
     
    About a week
before the big move, my father got called to cover a movie being
filmed in Central America and left my mother in charge with no more
than a rising of a single eyebrow. I’m pretty sure he volunteered
to go, because, if there was one thing Leonard Favor abhorred, it
was manual labor. He’d run from it like a drunk girl from a gang of
horny football players.
    In all honesty,
though, I don’t think my mom gave a damn. She was walking on air,
flittering from one stack of boxes to the next, singing and
chirping like some gigantic cockatiel. We all watched her with
bemused expressions. We had never seen such optimism and happiness
in her. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world, though the
move was going to prove difficult. Not only did we have to scrub
the rental house we were leaving spotless, we were going to have to
do the same thing for our new home as well.
    True to his
nature, Freddie had left us a little house-warming gift that needed
immediate attention or we were going to have a rat infestation
within a few weeks. Three months’ worth of trash, used condoms and
various disposable drug paraphernalia would probably attract
vampires for all we knew. At least, he hadn’t peed on the walls or
stuck boogers in the door locks. A thing we’d seen at one of my
aunt’s rentals years before. So there was some solace to be had. Or
maybe we were just lucky he wasn’t a very imaginative sort of
guy.
    By the second to
last day at our old house, we had finished cleaning and packing,
and were ready.
    We had started
early the following morning, taking a decent-sized load in my
mother’s Chrysler LaBaron, consisting mostly of our personal
belongings. They were the items we’d be using over the course of
next week, which my mother had budgeted as our “move-in” time -
clothes, underwear, socks, toiletries and towels – all the
necessities to survive seven straight days of work. A solid week of
slavery with only one day’s rest before us kids all went back to
school. Yeah, we were cutting it close.
    The rest of our
“stuff” was coming with