Free Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter

shakes his head. "He’s . . . fucked up."
    The first time he has ever said the word in front of
his father. A cloud moves across his father’s face and when it is
gone he suddenly begins to laugh. He laughs in a way Peter has never
heard before; something comes out of him that he didn’t know was
inside.
    "Jesus," he says, "that’s too good."
    And as Peter looks carefully, he sees his father is
not just laughing, he is smiling at him too. Shining.
    "I’ll get us a pizza," he says, and he
closes the door and goes downstairs. Peter stands in the darkness,
listening to his father and his uncle leave the house; he goes to the
window and opens it, and listens to them climb into his uncle’s
car.
    The engine starts, the lights go on, and` they are
gone. He lies on his bed with his hands folded behind his neck,
staring at the ceiling and holding on to the sound in the room as his
father laughed. Picturing the shine on his face.
    He doesn’t sleep or move, he simply lies on his bed
in the cold room until morning, when his uncle comes back to the
house alone, opening the door with a key, and climbs the stairs to
his room to tell him something bad has happened to his father.
    The boy walks straight to the window and jumps.
 
    PART TWO
    1966
    N icholas DiMaggio is
sitting by the window in Ed’s Diner, making circles on the table
with the bottom of his water glass. He is holding half a dozen
thoughts at once, moving from one to the next, trying at this moment
to imagine how the water gets on the bottom of the glass—not the
word condensation, he knows the word, but how it works. If it is
something you could see with a microscope.
    He wishes he had spent more time in school when he
was in school.
    He thinks of school.
    He looks at the circles and then his hands, grease in
the lines of the joints. He will scrub that out later, before he goes
home. He never goes home to his wife with dirty hands. He thinks of
her sitting straight-backed in a slip in front of her mirror,
studying her face. He holds her shoulders in his hands; he can feel
her pulse.
    He closes his hand and opens it, estimating how much
he’s aged by the pain in his knuckles, comparing it to what he
remembers from last winter.
    It’s always the winter that brings on pain.
    He feels the cold pressing on the window, feels its
breath through the glass, and looking that way, into the street, he
notices it has begun to snow.
    He hasn’t seen the sun in a week.
    Ed moves behind the counter. There is no one else in
the place, and he is waiting to close. Three-thirty in the afternoon.
    "You want more coffee, Nick?"
    "No," he says, "the kid should be done
all the work by now."
    He pushes himself up out of the booth, watching old
Ed smile, feeling the plastic seats stick to his pants, and puts a
dollar on the table next to his empty cup. It sits off center in the
saucer, a little coffee collected in the low side.
    "How’s he doin’, anyway?"
    "Real good," Nick says. "I left him
today, he’s got a water pump all over the sidewalk, probably won’t
take me two, three hours to find the pieces, get it back together."
    "What is he, twelve?"
    Nick stops for a moment to think. "No," he
says, "he’s only nine. You’re making me older than I fucking
am."
    "Somebody said he was already pretty good."
    Not meaning engines now.
    Nick shrugs. "He’s doing all right," he
says. "Come up sometime and see for yourself."
    The old man behind the counter looks down the slope
of his apron and grabs his crotch. "I would," he says, "but
you know Annie. I got to beat her off this thing with a spatula."
    Nick opens the door, and
feels the wind blowing up from Broad Street. He turns his back into
it and zips his windbreaker. Ed’s face appears at the window,
smiling a few inches away, and then the shade drops.
    * * *

    H e sees the white kids
first, two blocks away on the other side of McKean Street, coming
home from public school. The short one’s got a behind like an old
lady’s—the kind