Free Shame the Devil by George P. Pelecanos

plan. He knew
     that everything happened for a reason, even the bad.
    As for Vance, he had never seemed to be embarrassed by his old man. Bernie had heard Vance describe him one time as a “blue-collar
     eccentric.”Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound bad, not the way Vance said it; by the tone of his voice, you’d almost get the
     impression that Vance was proud.
    Vance’s friends stopped coming around when his mother, Walters’s wife, Lynne, got the cancer in both of her breasts. She’d
     found the lumps fairly early, but fear had made her wait too long to get herself checked. After the diagnosis she opted for
     the radical mastectomy, but it couldn’t save her and she went six months later, heavily doped on morphine, at home in their
     marriage bed.
    Bernie Walters’s father died that same year, in a nursing home on East West Highway.
    So it ended up just Bernie and Vance. By then Vance had entered Montgomery College, hoping to do a couple of years on the
     Takoma Park campus before heading for New York to attend one of the design schools in the city. At home he spent most of his
     time in his room, listening to CDs, studying, and talking on the phone with his friends. He worked three or four shifts a
     week waitering at the pizza parlor on Wisconsin, saving for his move to New York.
    When Bernie wasn’t working, he liked to hang out in the rec room or the laundry room, where he had a workbench set up. During
     warm-weather months he would drive his pickup down to Southern Maryland and spend each weekend on his property, hunting, casting
     for perch and catfish, walking the woods, and drinking beer.
    Walters hit the up-channel button on the remote and landed on a late-night talk show. The host with the gap-toothed grin said
     something, then stared unsmiling into the camera as the audience laughed. Walters shook a cigarette out of his pack and gave
     it a light.
    Those last couple of years Vance and Bernie had pretty much led separate lives. Now he wished they’d talked more — he wished
     he’d said those things to Vance that he’d never said.
    Vance talked to
him
now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance’s voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance
     would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn’t stop it. He knew it was Vance’s spirit that
     was talking to him in his dreams. He knew.
    He
would
tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he’d tell him when they were
     reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in
     the hands of the Lord.
    Stephanie Maroulis draped an arm over the shoulder of Dimitri Karras and laid the flat of her palm on his chest. She’d go
     to sleep now, drawing on the warmth of his body, spooned against him in the bed.
    Over the gray-haired head of Karras she could see the framed photograph of Steve set on the nightstand beside the bed. Steve
     was at the Preakness with his oldest friends grouped around, all of them on an afternoon beer drunk, happy, high in the sun
     and secure in the knowledge that it could not end. In the photo, Stephanie, smiling and smashed as the rest of them, stood
     behind Steve, her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing the base of his thick neck.
    The photograph had been on the nightstand for seven years. It was Steve’s favorite snapshot of the two of them and his friends,
     and as long as she lived in this place, the one-bedroom condo they’d bought soon after they were married, she’d leave the
     picture where it had always been. Leaving it there after Steve’s death was an act of neither superstition nor sentiment. The
     photograph
belonged
there. She saw no reason to move it now.
    “Doesn’t it make you sad?” asked Karras the week before. “I mean, to have to look at it every night before you go to sleep.”
    “It makes me happy to know that