Free Set the Dark on Fire by Jill Sorenson Page A

the rounds, opening the windows in her bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen, pushing aside the sliding glass door in the living room and turning on the ceiling fan overhead. They had an air conditioner, one that worked, but now that the temperature outside had dropped there was no reason to turn it on. By midnight, if she left the windows open, the house would be cold.
    As predicted, a pile of dirty dishes littered the kitchen sink. A plastic milk jug, sans milk, sat out on the cream-colored tile countertop. The red leather purse she’d been carrying last night was upended next to an open pizza box on the coffee table in front of the TV, proof that Dylan had fended for himself.
    He’d left her a single dollar bill and one solitary slice.
    Upon sight of congealed cheese, red pepper flakes, and grease spots on cardboard, her stomach should have rebelled. It didn’t. Sighing, she sank onto the couch, picked up the cold slice of pizza, and took a bite. It wasn’t half-bad.
    Having anticipated her little brother’s presence, and an inevitable discussion about Angel Martinez, she should have been relieved he wasn’t there. Instead she pictured Yesenia Montes’s battered, bitten body and felt a trickle of unease. Dylan hadn’t left a note, but that was nothing new. She was lucky he hadn’t taken her car.
    Normally Shay appreciated solitude. She worked alone a lot and enjoyed her own company. Her friends were few but constant, her social calendar steady, if uninspired, and her love life … well, her love life had always been hit or miss. More miss than hit, but who was counting? She had her friends. She had her career. And she had Dylan.
    Except that she didn’t have Dylan anymore. She hadn’t had him in a long time. Her mother’s death had torn them both apart, and he’d met the tragedy the way boys do, with defiant glares and sullen silence. Shay, on the other hand, had waged a teenage girl’s rebellion, falling in with the wrong crowd and staying out all night.
    If her father had stepped up as head of the family during that tumultuous time, maybe things would have been different. But her daddy had never been much of a provider, emotionally or financially. Hank Phillips was a restless dreamer who refused to be tied down by mortgages or material things. While Shay went to community college, they’d survived on welfare checks, food stamps, and the grace of God.
    Shay managed to graduate at the top of her class despite these hardships, and when she’d been offered a scholarship to Cal Poly, she’d jumped at the chance to escape her dysfunctional home life. In some ways, she’d sacrificed Dylan to save herself.
    Since then her brother had been distant. By age ten, he’d mastered the art of apathy. She’d given him space, thinking he was missing their mother, having growing pains, and grieving in his own way.
    As soon as she came home from college, their father took off again. Dylan hadn’t shown any reaction to his departure.
    They hadn’t seen Hank in almost five years now. Every so often they got a postcard from Tucson, Albuquerque, or Saskatchewan. The sporadic correspondence was a poor substitute for a father who hadn’t been much of a parent when he had been around.
    She wasn’t sure who’d had the more unconventional upbringing, her or Dylan. Shay had been raised almost solely by her mother, Lilah, a tenderhearted flower child no more equipped for reality, or the trials of parenthood, than her freewheeling husband. She’d been too soft, too emotional, too ethereal for this world.
    For all her faults, Shay had loved her mother desperately, and been loved by her the same way.
    Feeling a lump in her throat. Shay swallowed her sudden sentimentality along with the last bite of pizza. Directly across from her, next to the boxy old TV set, three half-deflated helium balloons were hovering above the carpet, their shiny, crinkly surfaces rustling under the whir of the ceiling fan.
    Happy birthday.

5
    Dylan