Page 22 of Intrepid

“C’mon in, babe. Your dad leave already?” Setting her hand on my shoulder, she guided me inside, and I caught a glimpse over my shoulder of her scanning the street.

I hated that he ignored her, but Jo could be overwhelming sometimes.

“D’you eat, sweetheart?” Her house always smelled like old, worn down wood and whatever she happened to be cooking. Spaghetti, just by the tomato-y wafts.

“Yeah,” I lifted the empty bag of fast food, which she swiped out of my hands with a frown and tossed into the trash.

“You and your daddy need a home-cooked meal. A good one. Tell him to come over this Friday, and I’ll make both of you some fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn.”

Damn that sounded good.

Beneath the notes of food and decay was the light clean scent of soap. Jo always kept her place clean, which made sense, because what little income she did manage to scrape together came from working as a maid for the rich assholes in the suburbs. A few times a week, she’d take the bus to Bloomfield, and spend the day cleaning a mansion for some lazy fuck with too much money. In the summer, Eli would go with her, just so he could ogle the rich guy’s hot daughter. I’d never personally seen her, but she seemed to consume Eli’s thoughts lately.

“Eli’s upstairs,” Jo said, and as I turned to head up, she grabbed my arm. “Before you go up there … has he …” Her brows pinched together in a troubling way. “He seem different to you lately?”

I shrugged, but in truth, he had. I’d been blowing it off as him just missing his dad, since he talked about him a lot more than usual. “Maybe. Why?”

Lips downturned, her brows flickered the way they did sometimes when she’d talk about my dad and try not to cry. “He just …” The double-blinking and shaking of her head was a poor attempt to stave off the tears welling in her eyes. “Earlier today, he was up playing a video game. I asked him three times to pick up his room because you were coming over. You know Eli’s a good boy. He always does as he’s told, but … it just seems lately, he’s ignoring me.” She rubbed her forehead and reached for the pack of smokes on the table beside her. With a slight tremble, she lit the cigarette, her cheeks caving with a deep inhale, and she blew the smoke off to the side. “So I told him a fourth time to clean up, and he just … blew up.” Her bunched shoulders emphasized the bafflement in her eyes. “Told me to get the fuck out of his room.” The trembling of her lips set me on edge—I hated watching her cry. “He never talked to me like that before,” she croaked, on the verge of sobbing.

Eli had a temper, for sure, but never toward his own ma. He damn near worshipped the woman, commiserating with my sense of helplessness when it came to our parents and their financial problems.

“You …. You would tell me if something was bothering him, right, James? I mean, if it’s a kid at school, or something?”

That would make sense, if we didn’t happen to be on summer break. “Yeah, sure.” I nodded. Eli didn’t tell me shit, though. “If he says anything, I’ll let you know.”

She palmed my cheek, letting the tear streak down her face. In the next breath, her features morphed into something more stern. “And if it’s one of the bastards in this neighborhood, I will kill them,” she gritted. “So you let me know.”

“I will.”

After another stroke of her thumb across my skin, she lowered her hand and gave a slight nod, sucking in another lungful of smoke.

I slid my duffle higher onto my shoulder and hiked up the staircase toward Eli’s room. I couldn’t imagine anyone from the neighborhood messing with him—they all seemed to do their own thing. Even the gang members didn’t really pay attention to the gangly little white boy.

I pushed through Eli’s bedroom door without bothering to knock, and found him just as Jo had described—sprawled out in his dirty ass room, playing the Wii his mom had won in a church raffle two years back. Letting the duffle fall to the floor, I slumped onto the folding chair beside him. “You ready?”

“Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He tossed his game aside, and pushed off the bed. Maybe it’d just been so long since we last hung out, or that I was more in tune to something being wrong because of his mom’s comments, but Eli looked older, for some reason. Tired. An itchy-looking redness flared over his eyelids, with deep circles beneath that confessed he hadn’t slept much. He reminded me of my dad on his third shift nights. “My mom’s been busting my ass all day long.”

“No offense.” I lifted my arm to cover my nose. “But something smells dead in here. You better find it, or I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.”

Tugging on his ratted out Nikes, Eli chuckled. “Shit my pants before you walked in, didn’t I?”

Slamming my fist into his shoulder, I lifted my shirt to my face. “Asshole.”

* * *

The sun had begun to set off to the west, giving some relief from the sweat drenching heat of midday, as I sat on the rusted fender of an old car and stole a cigarette from the pack of smokes that Eli had swiped from his mom.

“Saw her in a bikini last week.” Eli balanced on a charred stump of wood, arms outstretched as he walked across with his cigarette dangling from his lips, while he went on about the rich guy’s daughter again. “She’s got a tight little body.”

“Better than Mrs. Dawson’s?”

Mrs. Dawson taught Algebra and was every high school kid’s wet dream, with her tight pencil skirts and button-down tops.

“Don’t be stupid, she’s only eleven.” He jumped off the stump and hopped onto the hood of the car beside me. “But she’s so damn beautiful. And someday, she’s gonna be mine.”

“Doubt that. Unless your mom plans to move in and make cleaning their mansion a permanent thing.”

“Man, fuck that. If not for his hot daughter, I’d put a bullet between that motherfucker’s eyes.” He held his thumb and index finger in the shape of a gun and pretended to do just that.