Free Black Heart by Holly Black Page B

whatever you want. Sneak into a strip club. Watch bad movies. Crank call girls from school. Drive down to Atlantic City and lose all our cash at gin rummy. Just say the word.”
    “Is there really gin rummy in Atlantic City?”
    “Probably not,” I admit. “But I bet there are some old folks who’d be willing to sit in on a game and take your money.”
    “I want to get drunk—so drunk,” he says wistfully. “So drunk that I forget not just tonight but, like, the last six months of my life.”
    That makes me think uncomfortably of Barron and his memory curses. I wonder how much, right now, Sam wouldpay to be able to do just that. To forget Daneca. To forget he ever loved her.
    Or to make her forget that she stopped loving him.
    Like Philip got Barron to make Maura—Philip’s wife—forget she was going to leave him. It didn’t work. They just had the same fights over and over again as she fell out of love with him exactly the same way she had before. Over and over. Until she shot him in the chest.
    “Cassel?” Sam says, shoving my shoulder with a gloved hand. “Anyone home in there?”
    “Sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “Drunk. Right. Let me survey the booze situation.”
    There’s always been a liquor cabinet in the dining room. I don’t think anyone’s been in it since before Dad died and Mom went to prison. There was so much clutter in front of it that it wasn’t exactly easy to get into. I find a couple of bottles of wine in the back, along with some bottles of brown liquor with labels I don’t recognize, and a few newer-looking things in the front. The necks are coated in dust. I take everything out and pile it on the dining room table.
    “What’s Armagnac?” I call to Sam.
    “It’s fancy brandy,” my grandfather says from the kitchen. A few moments later he sticks his head into the room. “What’s all that?”
    “Mom’s liquor,” I say.
    He picks up one of the bottles of wine and looks at the label. Then he turns it upside down. “Lot of sediment. This is either going to be the best thing you ever drank or vinegar.”
    The inventory turns out to be three bottles of possibly sour wine; the Armagnac; a bottle of rye that’s mostly full; pear brandy with a pale globe of fruit floating in it; and a container of Campari, which is bright red and smells like cough medicine.
    Grandad opens all three bottles of wine when we sit down to dinner. He pours the first into a glass. It’s a dark amber, almost the same color as the rye.
    He shakes his head. “Dead. Toss it.”
    “Shouldn’t we at least try it?” I ask.
    Sam looks at my grandfather nervously, like he’s expecting to get in trouble for our liquor cabinet raid. I don’t point out that among most people I know, legal drinking age isn’t going to exactly be a sticking point. Sam should cast his mind back to Philip’s wake.
    Grandad laughs. “Go ahead if you want, but you’re going to be sorry. It’ll probably do better in your gas tank than in your stomach.”
    I take his word for it.
    The next one is nearly as black as ink. Grandad takes a sip and grins. “Here we go. You kids are in for a treat. Don’t just glug this stuff.”
    In the kind of fancy magazines my mother reads when she’s shopping for men, they rate wines, praising them for tasting like things that don’t sound good to drink—butter and fresh cut grass and oak. The descriptions used to make me laugh, but this wine really does taste like plums and black pepper, with a delicious sourness that fills my whole mouth.
    “Wow,” says Sam.
    We finish off the rest of the wine and start on the rye. Sam pours his into a water glass.
    “So what’s the matter?” Grandad asks him.
    Sam bangs his head against the table lightly and then downs his drink in three long swallows. I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten to be worried about getting in trouble with anyone. “My girlfriend dumped me.”
    “Huh,” Grandad says, nodding. “The young lady with you at Philip’s