Free Sweet Talk Me by Kieran Kramer Page A

knew of.
    So what? He obviously needed a friend.
    Or a brother.
    When Harrison felt guilty, he was like a pacing lion in a cage at the zoo. Ready to roar and shake something to pieces. Anything but focus on the guilt.
    Gage shrugged. “I knew you’d be worried. So why not stop that from happening?” He walked into the kitchen. “Now, what would the famous country music singer from South Carolina like? Coffee or a beer?”
    “Darius Rucker’s not here. Is that the best clue you can come up with for me?” Harrison sauntered into the kitchen, looking for further evidence of his brother’s overwhelming aversion to change. “Speaking of which, why haven’t you put me in any of your puzzles? Or at least one of my song titles?”
    Gage held up a K-Cup, his face smooth and untroubled. “This?”
    Harrison knocked it out of his hands. “I’m pissed.”
    The little plastic cup rolled across the floor until it came to a slight depression and got trapped. He’d been angry for years—his whole life—because he was confused. And worried. He hated being either one. But around Gage, he was always one or the other or both.
    “I didn’t know you had a fragile ego,” Gage said without any heat. “I haven’t put you or one of your song titles in a puzzle because neither your name nor those song titles have ever come up during the construction process.”
    Harrison ran both his hands down his face. “I don’t care about the goddamned puzzles. I know you see them in your head—not the whole thing at once, but corners. And you use those mental images as inspiration.”
    “Exactly.” Gage opened the refrigerator. “So what’s the problem?”
    “This place, man.” Harrison lifted his hands and let them drop like heavy weights against his thighs. “Sorry I went all cyborg on you. But I can’t believe you’ve been living here. Except for college, and a couple years on a ship, you’ve been in this trailer your entire life. It’s time to move on.” He walked a few steps— squeak! squeak! went the floor—bent over, scooped up the K-Cup, and stuck it on the counter.
    “I have new things, too. Like that Keurig machine.” Gage angled his head at the compact machine on the counter.
    “Am I supposed to be impressed?” Harrison tried not to inject too much scorn into his voice. “I wouldn’t let my worst enemy live here.”
    “It’s Mom and Dad’s trailer.” Gage took a beer out of the fridge, pried off the cap with the old-fashioned bottle-cap remover screwed under a cabinet, and shoved the bottle in Harrison’s hand. “I’m fine here.”
    Harrison took a long swig. “Change is hard for you, I know. But this place should have been condemned when I left it. I sold it to the owner of the park for fifty bucks, did you know that?”
    “No.”
    “He said he’d use it as his man cave. Emphasis on cave. ”
    “He made a profit then. I bought it back from him for a hundred dollars.” Gage, unperturbed, as always, went back out to the sitting area. “The couch still pulls out.”
    “Oh, God. I can’t even imagine what the mattress must be like. Let me see the rest.”
    If his old bedspread was still there—
    Yes. It was. Red ribbed cotton from Sears. Mom had bought it at Goodwill. The other twin had a blue quilt with little moons all over it. That had been Gage’s.
    “Don’t tell me you kept Mama’s floral bedspread.” Harrison stalked to the bigger bedroom where their parents had slept. Yep, nothing—nothing—had changed. Except for the fact that half the rear wall of the trailer, not visible from the driveway, was covered in a plastic tarp and duct-taped down.
    He turned. “You really have to move.”
    Gage looked unfazed. Then again, he always did. “I sleep in our old room. I don’t come in here.”
    “The place is clean, I’ll grant you that,” said Harrison. “But it’s uninhabitable.”
    “That’s a relative term. If we were on Survivor right now and ran across this trailer in the