Free Famous by Blake Crouch Page B

grilled hamburgers and hotdogs for everyone. A
very classy ceremony all around. The bride and groom spent their
honeymoon in Myrtle Beach, if that means anything to you.
    The only reason I even care to mention it, is
because my brother was there.
    Though I’m Bo’s big brother (by four years),
we have one of those relationships where the younger brother feels
more like the older brother. What I’m saying is, he’s done a lot
more with his life than I have with mine. He was married a few
years ago, and now has a three-year-old boy. Bo’s highly
intelligent, too. I don’t know what he does for a living, but I’m
sure he makes gobs of money. And he’s a genuinely nice guy. For
instance, listen to what he did at that wedding I was telling you
about. During the reception, instead of mingling with our family,
he came down to the edge of the dried-up pond where I’d been
sitting since the ceremony ended, avoiding people, as my mother
would say. He asked me if I wanted to take a walk on the hiking
paths, just the two of us. I said all right, and we spent the next
hour strolling through the woods of Lakewood Park. I even remember
what we talked about. Mostly, we laughed about the Worst Wedding in
the World and how funny it was that he’d come all the way from the
Pacific Ocean to witness this piece of shit.
    Bo never asked me why I still lived with Mom
and Dad. He never even told me I should get my own place or
anything. And man he hates Mom and Dad.
    Instead, he told me all about living in
Seattle, and how it rained “every fucking day.” Just like I was a
regular guy.
    If you asked me to tell you when I was
happiest, I would probably say it was that afternoon with my little
brother. I mean, have you ever been around someone, and you know
they just take you as is? That even if they could change you for
the better, they wouldn’t do it?
    It’s kind of like that with Bo.
     
    The first thing that passes through my mind
when the jet touches down on the runway of LAX is, I’m twenty miles
from James Jansen’s home. It looks like the tarmac of any other
airport from my first class window, but the feel of this city, the
sprawl of 10 p.m. light and the mansions and studios and activity
they suggest, fills me with energy. As the pilot welcomes us to Los
Angeles, local time 10:02 p.m., temp. 81 degrees, I can hardly sit
still.
    All I can think is I am home now. I’m
home.
     
    It’s after 11:00 when I pay the cab fare and
walk through the grass of my brother’s lawn toward the front porch.
His street is a quiet one. Sprinklers water neighboring yards with
a soothing hush. I hear crickets. There aren’t too many trees from
what I can tell, and the air smells dry and sharp.
    The lights are still on inside his bungalow.
Three cars in the driveway. Laughter escapes through the open
windows.
    I step onto the front porch, and I’ll be
honest, I’m nervous. Sort of wish I’d let Bo know I was coming.
Instead of knocking on the door right away, I set my luggage down
on the planked porch and take a seat on the bench.
    I pick out four distinct voices coming from a
room which I cannot see from the porch. Bo, another man, and two
women. I’ll bet one of them is his wife. I guess that’s what you do
on a Friday night when you’re married: have friends over who are
married, about the same age as you, and sit and laugh in the
kitchen over drinks while your child sleeps. Seems a very safe,
suburban thing to do.
    I eavesdrop on their conversation. It’s not
terribly interesting. One of the women is talking about how she got
stuck in traffic for five hours the other day, and that she was so
bored, she sat on the hood of her car and read an entire book. I
know that sounds interesting, but the way she tells it is actually
pretty dull. You can tell she thinks it’s a really neat
story. I have to stop listening when she says, “And there I am,
sitting on the hood of my car at four in the afternoon on the 105,
getting a tan and reading a