The Kingdom of Kevin Malone Read Online Free PDF

part.
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    When I got home, my aunts were cleaning up in the kitchen. The food was all put away, and there were a million dishes to be washed. The aunts were arguing in low voices about whether cremation was okay for Jews no matter how irreligious they were. They shut up when they saw me.
    In the living room Uncle Saul sat slumped on the couch, frowning at his shoes. He saw me and said, “Your mom’s asleep, Amy. I had to give her a sedative.”
    I felt weird—relieved and angry at the same time. My mom hates any kind of drugs or medicines, Uncle Saul knows that. I also felt out of phase with what he was saying because I was still thinking about Kevin and his Fayre Farre.
    Uncle Saul looked at me with a concerned expression and asked if I’d heard what he’d said. I guess he was trying not to react to the fact that I was filthy with soot and shoeless. He told me in a super-kindly voice that my Aunt Jennie would be staying over with me and Mom again, and that my dad would be back from Los Angeles very late tonight.
    That was good news, anyway.
    I went to my own room to get cleaned up, which was not as easy as it sounds. Soot feels soft and velvety, but it’s greasy and it sticks. I was a mess. No wonder people had given me funny looks all the way home from the park.
    Now what? I absolutely did not want to go back out there with my relatives. It was sickening, somehow, that Uncle Saul was sitting alive in our living room, and Cousin Shelly was dead. My strongest memories of Uncle Saul were from all the times he gave horrible, burning flu shots at Thanksgiving and tetanus shots at Passover to me and my cousins. Of course he didn’t mean to be a bad guy, but how do you think it seemed to us?
    But Cousin Shelly, who laughed so much and doodled endless curly plants and vines all over the paper placemats at Cannibal’s, her favorite restaurant, was just ashes scattered over the Hudson River from a ferryboat.
    Ash wine, I thought. Shelly was ash wine now.
    My room felt cold and strange. Probably my little cousins Fran and Kimmie had been in there, snooping through my stuff. I wandered out in my bathrobe and listened at the kitchen doorway to the aunts talking about how Uncle Irv was still complaining that the funeral service had not been traditional enough for him.
    Never mind that Shelly wouldn’t have had a service at all. Mom had always called her, admiringly, a “free spirit,” which sounded great to me. It was disgusting that Mom had given in to Uncle Irv even as far as she had. I certainly couldn’t stay in the apartment, not with Mom knocked out in her bedroom and the rest of them whispering and muttering and sighing. Nobody needed me anyway.
    I put on a clean shirt and jeans and used the phone in my room to call Rachel.
    â€œHey,” she said, “what happened to you? I’ve heard of boy-chasing but I’ve never seen a girl run so fast that she left her shoes behind. You want them back, or should I give them to Goodwill?”
    I told Uncle Saul I was going down to the corner store for a burger and a malt. He didn’t object, or ask why I was carrying Rachel’s skates with me. He also didn’t mention the fact that I had ducked out of sitting shiva; but he gave me one of those looks they give you, sad and mad and disappointed all at the same time. I was very glad to get out of there.
    Rachel met me as arranged, though she was late as usual. I was almost through with my malt when she arrived, bringing Claudia with her.
    There was thin, blonde Rachel in a moss-green jumpsuit and her gorgeous, fairy-tale princess hair, and there was—well, Claudia, also from school. Claudia Falcone was a ditz. But not just ditzy. I mean there was method to her madness, sort of. Her mom had a drinking problem. Claudia talked about it with her friends as if she didn’t care, but she did. Her mother went into a drying-out hospital now and then and