The Last Kind Words Read Online Free PDF Page A

state so they ran to another. The heat came down so they moved to cooler climes. They never stayed put. Except that we did. It made things a little hinky. All the cops knew us. All the undercover journalists would show up at our door trying to sell us soap or vacuum cleaners, carrying cases with hidden cameras and digital feeds inside. We could spot them from fifty feet away.
    That was another reason why it took so long for the place to be built. The house was a well-crafted magic trick. Unless you were intimately familiar with its interior, you’d never guess just how many crawl spaces, hidden rooms, extended root cellars, and attic areas the place actually had. Whole sections of floorboards could be peeled back, but you had to know where the locking mechanisms were. Walls slid aside. Built-in staircases unfolded and let you climb eight or twelve feet up into recessed chambers. You couldn’t use a hammer to find a hollow spot, because damn near every inch of the extra space was filled with loot. Some of it went back fifty years. My grandfather and his brothers had boosted a lot of shit back in the fifties that they weren’t able to fence. But you never dumped hot property. You sold it or planted it or kept it. When your whole family was made up of grifters and gaffers and second-story men, that meant a ton of excess haul: old machinery, bicycle parts, busted record players, eight-track tape decks, old TVs with missing vacuum tubes, furniture, worthless silverware, and literally tons of other crap I’d never even seen.
    Under the living room where my grandfather sat in his chair, with the quiet strains of cartoon characters taking frying pans to their heads, was a cache of unfenced curio bric-a-brac going back decades. My father had never been able to resist small trinkets and novelty gadgets that he felt might have an interesting history. In the middle of a job he’d pocket broken shillelaghs, nutcrackers with busted hinges, dinged Zippo lighters, music boxes with cracked dancers, chipped Dresden dolls, and old tools whose purpose eluded him. He had a healthy respect for hands and couldn’t resist anything that looked like it had been caressed and fondled or well applied.
    The irony of a useless man in a room stationed over useless hidden things wasn’t lost on me. I figured if my grandfather grew lucid at all anymore, it wouldn’t be lost on him either. Gramp’s hands twitched and trembled. His eyes never left the television screen.
    My mother came in holding a bowl of oatmeal and said, “Do you want to feed him?”
    “No.”
    So she sat on the loveseat and fed him instead. I stood close to his shoulder and watched. She kept up a running monologue of childish banter, and Gramp never reacted in any way. During commercials his chin would droop and his gaze would lower, his whole body slumping forward. When the cartoons came back on he’d sit a little straighter. He’d make noises that might have been laughter.
    I took it for as long as I could and then I started out of the room. I made it two steps and knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure what. I turned and Old Shep looked exactly the same, still making his sounds but a little louder now. I looked at the floor. I scanned the room. Then I checked my pocket. My wallet was missing.
    Even with the Parkinson’s and the Alzheimer’s he was an ace pickpocket. It took me a minute to find my wallet deep in the folds of his robe. He was still in there somewhere.
    I said, “Sweet action, Gramp,” but a commercial was on and he was slumped in his seat with his strings cut.

As I trotted down the drive into the road, JFK came lumbering after me. I ran back inside and got his leash. I didn’t know if his knees would hold up, but I didn’t plan to do more than a few miles. I wasn’t even going to pretend to be heading anywhere except Kimmy’s place.
    The area had changed some. A few more housing tracts had gone up, a couple of new strip malls. We clung to Old