White Cat Read Online Free PDF

holidays, when the oven has been on all day. And that makes me think about our father sitting at the dinner table, smoking long, thin cigarillos that yellowed his fingertips, while the turkey cooked. Sometimes, on bad days, when I really miss him, I’ll buy cigarillos and burn them in an ashtray.
    Right now, though, all I miss is Wallingford and the person I could pretend to be when I was there.
    “Grandad is coming tomorrow,” Philip says. “He wants you to go over to the old house and help him clean it out. He says he wants it all fixed up for Mom, when she gets out.”
    “I don’t think that’s what she wants,” I say. “She doesn’t like people messing with her stuff.”
    He sighs. “Tell that to him.”
    “I don’t want to go,” I say. Philip means the house we grew up in—a big old place stuffed with the many things our parents accumulated. No garage sale was left unplundered as they grifted their way across the country each summer, while we kids stayed down in the Pine Barrens with Grandad. By the time dad died, the junk was so piled up that there were tunnels instead of rooms.
    “Then don’t,” Philip says, and for a moment I actually think he’s going to look me in the eye, but he addresses my collar instead. “Mom can take care of herself. She always has. I doubt she’s even going back to that dump when she finishes her sentence.”
    Mom and Philip have been on the outs since the trial, when he reluctantly bullied witnesses to help her defense team. Philip’s a physical worker—a body worker—who can break a leg with the brush of his pinkie. I don’t think he forgave Mom for being convicted despite him.
    Plus the blowback made him pretty sick.
    I sigh. Unsaid is where I’m supposed to go if not with Grandad. I very much doubt Philip is planning on letting me stay. “You can tell Grandad I’m only his manservant till I get back in school. And that’ll take me a week, at most.”
    “Tell him yourself,” Philip says.
    Maura folds her arms across her chest. It’s so strange to see her bare hands that I’m embarrassed. Mom hated gloves at home; she said that families were supposed to trust one another. I guess Philip believes that too. Or something.
    It’s different when the hands belong to someone I’m not related to, even if she is my sister-in-law. I try and force my gaze to her collarbone.
    “Don’t let him bully you into staying at that creepy place,” Maura tells me.
    “We used to live there!” Philip gets up and takes a beer from the fridge. “Anyway, I’m not the one telling him to go.” He pops the top, takes a long swig, and unbuttons the neck of his white dress shirt. I see the necklace of keloids, where his maker cut across his throat to symbolize the death of Philip’s previous life, and then packed the wound with ash until it scarred in a long, swollen line. It looks like a flesh-colored worm coiled above his collarbone. All laborers, minor crime bosses, have them. Just like a rose over the heart showed you were one of the Russian bratva , or like a yakuza inserts pearls under the skin of his penis for every year in jail. Philip got hisscars three years back; now all he has to do to see people flinch is loosen his collar.
    I don’t flinch.
    The big six worker families came into power all down the East Coast in the thirties and have remained that way ever since. Nonomura. Goldbloom. Volpe. Rice. Brennan. Zacharov. They control everything, from the cheap and probably fake charms dangling near lighters on convenience store counters, to tarot card readers at malls who offer little curses for twenty extra dollars, to assault and murder done for those who can afford it and know who to pay. And my brother’s one of the people you pay, just like my Grandad was.
    Maura looks away from him, gazing dreamily out the windows at the mostly dead stretch of grass outside the apartment. “Do you hear the music? Outside.”
    “Cassel wants to stay at the old house,” says