Free One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper Page B

do.
    “Oliver’s parking the car,” Jack says.
    “Tell him to keep it running.”
    Jack raises his eyebrows and looks Silver over in his hospital gown.
    “Are we cutting out?”
    “We are.”
    “Is that wise?”
    “No.”
    Jack shakes his head, then smiles and pulls out his cell phone. “Cool.”

CHAPTER 16
    I n the car, on the way home, Denise cries softly in the front seat. Casey wishes like hell she would stop. She loves her, but Denise’s years of being a single mother have forged in her a finely honed martyr complex, and she tends to view everyone else’s problems as being there simply to increase her own immeasurable burden.
    “Jesus, Mom, will you give it a rest?”
    “I’m sorry that my teenage daughter’s pregnancy is upsetting to me.”
    “Have you considered the possibility that it’s upsetting to me, too?”
    “Of course. I just . . . How could you do this? You know better.”
    “It was an accident, obviously.”
    “You accidentally had unprotected sex?”
    “Would it make you feel better if I said I was raped?”
    “Don’t even talk like that.”
    “I’m just trying to figure out at what point you might start feeling sorry for me and not yourself.”
    “I think we all need to take a beat here,” Rich says.
    “Trust me, I feel very sorry for you,” Denise says in a tone that never fails to make Casey contemplate homicide by fire.
    “Denise,” Rich says quietly.
    “Dad handled this much better than you,” Casey says, watching as the remark lands like a grenade.
    Denise turns around in the front seat to face Casey, her red-rimmed eyes wide with anger. “I’m sure he did. Fucking up is Silver’s superpower. He must have been thrilled to see you’re a chip off the old block.”
    “Well, he didn’t make it about him, unlike some other people.”
    “So go live with him. I’m sure the two of you—I’m sorry, the three of you—will be very happy.”
    Casey presses her forehead against the window and draws a heart with an arrow through it in the fog left by her breath. The people on the sidewalk look impossibly, obnoxiously happy, like they’re about to break into a spontaneous musical number.
    “We’re all upset . . .” Rich tries again.
    “Rich!” Denise shouts at him. “For Christ’s sake, just shut up and drive!”

CHAPTER 17
    H e is dying. Maybe. It’s a gray area. He spends a few minutes trying to sort through the tangled morass of his crossed thoughts, trying to ascertain how he feels. He doesn’t seem to be scared, or even terribly upset. He has regrets, certainly, but he had those when he wasn’t dying, too. More than anything, the prevailing emotion seems to be one of relief.
    He sits at his desk, surveying his shitty apartment, which consists of two bedrooms, an L-shaped living/dining area, and an exposed kitchen. The dirt-brown area rug is threadbare and stained, the exposed wood in desperate need of scraping and refinishing. The couch facing the television is permanently bowed from where he has spent the majority of the last seven years feeling sorry for himself and self-medicating with beer and television. The only decorations on the walls are a large painting of an oceanic vista in the living room that was left there by the previous tenant for obvious reasons, and a framed photo of him and Casey, taken when she was six years old. She is sitting on his lap, laughing—he’d been tickling her just before Denise shot the picture—and she’s small and perfect in her shorts and tank top, and he is slim and still daring to be hopeful and hasn’t let her down yet, and it hurts him to look at it so he tends not to. The second bedroom was supposed to be hers. He had painted it pink and bought a Tinker Bell bedspread, but Casey never got into the habit of staying over, and the room eventually became a depository for discarded drum equipment: old stands, cymbals, skins, drum frames, and pedals for which he no longer has any use. He finds it hard to part with