Free Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman

Christmas lights framed the mirror behind the bar. She rested her eyes on a corner of the beer cooler and let the whole place disappear.
    “Shane’ll be here,” his Uncle Shamus told her. Gerry and Patrick patted her on the back, drawing her into the room again, telegraphing varied states of crazy. She could feel something in them that envied the violence she’d come from, like they felt it on her and wanted to rub up against it.
    “It’s homecoming for you and Gerry both,” Shamus said, his eyes glassy, the whites darkened with a broken brocade of red. He smirked and gave her a quick wink. Gerry raised his glass. “Released yesterday morning,” Shamus explained, “picked up for breaking and entering, wunnit?”
    “For walking a dog,” Gerry said. “It was for walking a dog, let’s be honest here.”
    “For breaking into a nice little house on the northside, entering it, and walking a yuppie couple’s dog,” Patrick explained to Lauren.
    “Which they’d irresponsibly left alone for who-the-fuck knows how long, barking and whining,” Gerry said.
    “And when he was done with the walking,” Shamus continued, “he brought the dog back and watched some television. Which startled the young couple when they returned home.”
    “They were just paranoid,” Gerry said, laughing. “They could see I wasn’t doing nothing, they didn’t have to get so pissed off about it. I told them I was helping them out.”
    “And then he threatened them with a steak knife,” Shamus concluded.
    “All right, enough now!” Gerry said. “It wasn’t a steak knife. It was a steak-knife sharpener.”
    “Do they make such an item?” Patrick asked quietly.
    “And they were threatening me,” Gerry said, all his humor gone. “I took care of their animal and they were threatening me. I should’ve just taken him to my place. You don’t leave a dog whining like that.”
    Lauren had started disliking the Patricks the week she met them. She was a sophomore in high school and had watched Uncle Gerry eat a piece of glass on a fifty-dollar bet. The blood in his mouth. The sound of him chewing it. She was angry that the image had become a part of her memory, and by virtue of that memory part of herself. She would lie awake sometimes thinking about how to erase it. Probing the insides of her cheek with her tongue and succumbing to a breathless queasy feeling, the cut within the protected flesh of the mouth. She didn’t like it. And she didn’t like them. But the Patricks didn’t care. They were going to like her no matter what. And this she hated the most of all—that they seemed to possess some kind of wisdom, something tribal and suicidal tied tightly to the neighborhood, a kind of smirking anarchic spirit that would see them burn like monks to prove that nothing could touch what they were.
    “So,” she said, ignoring the dog story as if they’d never told it, “you guys expecting Shane?”
    “Fuck yes,” Patrick said, “and we haven’t yet got the quality time we would have liked with him.”
    She put money on the bar to pay for the beer but Shamus handed it back to her. His skin was bad, a fine web of capillaries blooming around his nose, but the unmistakable gleam of intelligence in his rheumy eyes. “Everybody in this fucking place owes you a drink,” he said. She stared blankly at him, then around the bar. She thought for one brief moment that she could buy The Bag of Nails with her combat pay and just have it torn down. Then, having had an idea worthy of toasting, she raised her glass to the Patricks and drank the smooth and bitter pint in several long gulps.
    “Everybody,” Shamus said again, and his brothers raised their glasses and looked menacingly at the small group of people who were spending the midafternoon of December 26 sitting in a bar. No one looked up. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. In her jeans and flannel no one else would understand where she had been. They wouldn’t take up the