In Between Days Read Online Free Page B

protector, her confidant, and even now she realizes that there is no one else in her life who she can trust with this information, no one else who she would even consider telling the story to. Still, thinking of Raja, she decides against it, decides instead to change the subject. “Where are you taking me anyway?” she says finally as they’re moving toward the exit.
    “Back home. Back to Mom’s.”
    She looks at him. “Can’t you take me somewhere else?”
    “Like where?”
    “Like anywhere. You know, anywhere but
there
.”
    He steadies the wheel. “Well, I’m going to a club later, but I don’t think it’s really your type of club, if you know what I mean.” He looks at her and winks.
    “I don’t care,” she says. “As long as they have booze, I really don’t care. And besides, I like gay clubs. Gay men are about the only type of men who are nice to me these days.”
    He puts on his blinker, takes the exit.
    “How are they doing anyway?” she says.
    “Who?”
    “Mom and Dad.”
    He looks at her and shakes his head. “Last week Mom got the locks changed on the house.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess she didn’t want him sneaking into the house anymore and stealing her stuff. He still has his key, you know, and so I guess he kept coming by during his lunch break and hanging out there. I caught him once. He was just sitting around the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine, reading the paper.”
    “God,” she says. “That’s depressing.”
    “I know.”
    She looks at him. “So, I guess they’re not talking still.”
    “Nope. Not unless you count leaving hostile messages on each other’s voice mail as talking.”
    She looks at her brother and sighs. In a way, she still feels guilty about it, guilty for leaving him here all alone to deal with their parents by himself, guilty for not being around when it all went down. It had been Richard who had had to deal with the brunt of it, Richard who had had to endure the fighting, the legal disagreements, the disassembling of the house. It had been Richard who had called her up that Sunday night in late October and told her the news, left that cryptic message on her voice mail:
World War Three here, Chlo. I’m serious. All’s not well on the home front. Call me as soon as you can
. And when she’d called, he’d been sweet, almost apologetic about it, like it had all been his fault. He’d listened to her as she’d cried for half the night, comforting her, reassuring her. And then finally, when she’d finished, when she’d finally exhausted herself, he’d started to laugh.
Well, there’s one good thing about all this, you know
.
    What’s that?
    No more family meals
.
    It had been a joke between them. Family meals. The one thing they both hated. The one thing they both despised. Their father sitting at the far end of the table, carving the meat, their mother sitting beside him, pretending to love him. The two of them sitting around obediently at the far end of the room, pretending to be two well-adjusted children in a well-adjusted home.It had been the greatest hypocrisy of all. These family meals. The greatest charade.
    At the edge of the exit, Richard takes a left onto a side street, and suddenly the city of Houston comes into view: the neon-lit supermarkets, the taqueries, the giant palm trees swaying in the wind. This old familiar setting, the tropical paradise of her youth, coming back into view. She leans back in her seat and takes it all in.
    As Richard pulls onto another street, she looks at him.
    “You know, I read those poems you sent me.”
    “Oh yeah? Which ones?”
    “All of them,” she says, smiling at him. “They’re good.”
    “You think?”
    “Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but they’re definitely a lot better than that crap they publish in the literary magazine back at school.”
    He looks at her and smiles. “Thanks,” he says. Then he idles the car at a stoplight.