Free Switched at Birth by Barry Rachin

 
    Switched at Birth
    by
    Barry Rachin
     
     
    SMASHWORDS EDITION
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    Published by:
    Barry Rachin on Smashwords
     
     
    Switched at Birth
    Copyright © 2012 by Barry
Rachin
     
     
    Smashwords Edition, License
Notes
     
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    This short story represents a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely
coincidental.
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    Switched at Birth
     
     
     
    “ Adrian Flanagan’s working
three to eleven over at the Brentwood Nursing Home.” Like a poker
player dealt a lousy hand and waits for his opponent to fold or
raise the ante, Jason Mangarelli fidgeted with his hands. “Thought
I might drop by later this week and see how she’s
doing.”
    His mother, who was stuffing the
washing machine with a load of soiled towels grimaced but never
bothered to raise her head. The wiry youth, who stood a tad under
six feet, flicked a shock of dark hair out of his hazel eyes and
watched her measure out a cupful of Borax liquid detergent. Mrs.
Mangarelli, a petite Italian woman with auburn hair and a pointy
nose, sprinkled softener into the machine before closing the lid.
“Not a good idea.”
    “ Why’s that?”
    “ The nursing home is a
private business and you’ve no legitimate reason being
there.”
    Jason cringed. His mother was doing
‘the voice’. The voice was a stilted, phony as a three-dollar bill
inflection that she inadvertently slipped into when feeling
uncomfortable, out of her natural element. A set of gears in the
washer clicked and the agitator began swirling the dirty clothes in
the sudsy water. Only now did his mother step back, hands on hips,
and look her son full in the face. “Some things are better left in
the past.”
    Some things … A year older than Jason, Adrian would have been
twenty-three, though no one had laid eyes on the girl in over a
decade. Around Jason’s sophomore year in high school, raunchy
rumors began percolating. Then, mercifully, the ugliness died away.
The teenage girl blipped off the radar screen, vanished presumably
into some sordid black hole, only to resurface five years later.
Well, not exactly. Adrian never physically resurfaced—only the
swirl of smutty gossip. “I wonder if Jack Flanagan knows his oldest
daughter’s back in town.”
    Jason’s mother shrugged. He could see
her pulling up the drawbridge, walling herself up behind a thick
slab of brittle-minded certitudes. “It’s been at least a dozen
years now,” the boy pressed his point. “The jerk doesn’t care if
Adrian’s alive or dead?”
     
    “ She disgraced her
family.”
    Jason snorted sarcastically. “And in
the next breath I suppose you’re gonna tell me Adrian’s old man’s a
freakin’ saint?” His mother’s eyes flared, her lower jaw flattening
like a battering ram but the middle-aged woman held her
tongue.
     
    Arian lived three houses down on the
cul-de-sac. Jason remembered her as a round-faced imp with coal
black hair cropped short —a persnickety tomboy with sparkling eyes,
a burnished coppery complexion and stocky frame. When they were in
fourth grade Adrian took Jason aside. “My dad told my mother she’s
got shit for brains.” Jason didn’t know what to say. “She called
him a two-timing louse.”
    Jack Flanagan, a pot-bellied Irishman,
was a loud-mouth braggart who made it big in the durable medical
supply business. Adrian’s mother