Free Can't Stand the Heat? by Margaret Watson Page A

she’d said coolly. To make decisions he didn’t want to be bothered with.
    Boxes were stacked neatly in one corner, and the single lightbulb threw shadows on the concrete floor and the wall. The room was dusty and cold. A final resting place for bad memories.
    All that was left of his family.
    He pulled the top box to the floor and ripped open the duct tape holding it closed. It was full of books. Hardcover novels and biographies, mostly. He set that box aside.
    The second box held more books. Paperbacks this time, and children’s books. He drew them out and looked at them, one after another. The Velveteen Rabbit. Charlotte’s Web. The Polar Express.
    He remembered that one. His mother had cried every time she read the last line. He hadn’t thought about the way his mother had read to him since long before she’d died in a car accident more than six years ago. She’d been on her way home from the airport in Green Bay after visiting him in Chicago. His father had blamed Walker for her death.
    His hand wasn’t quite steady as he replaced the books in the box.
    He found the photos in the fifth box he opened. The framed ones had been wrapped in newspaper to protect them. The albums were cheap vinyl, cracked and faded. As if they’d been thumbed through many times.
    One of the albums was white. The first page held three newborn-baby pictures—his mother’s, his father’s and his. A heart drawn in red marker enclosed all of them.
    He turned the pages and saw pictures of him next to his parents. The photo he remembered was on a page with a similar one of his father. They’d been taken at the same studio, and both babies were sitting on the floor.
    His father wore a sailor suit and a matching cap. Walker wore a tiny dress shirt and pants—just as Nick had worn.
    He’d been wrong; Nick’s baby picture hadn’t looked like Walker’s. It looked like his father’s. He touched the curve of the grinning mouth, the crinkled shape of the eyes. Maybe this would convince Jen he was right.
    He gently took the two photos out of the album, then turned the page. There was a snapshot of all three of them. His father had one arm wrapped around his mother’s shoulders, and the other held a laughing baby. Other images followed: his father taking him trick-or-treating on Halloween. Building with Lego blocks on Christmas morning. Helping him ride his first bicycle.
    They were happy in those pictures. Smiling. How had this relaxed, proud father become the man who’d ridden Walker so hard? The man who had been angry enough to cut all ties because his son didn’t want to be a fisherman? Bitter enough to refuse to speak to Walker at his mother’s funeral?
    He set the album aside and replaced all the other photos in the carton. As he pushed the box back in place, he hesitated.
    He shouldn’t leave this stuff sitting in here. All these things had been important to his mother. Maybe his father, too.
    He’d bring them back to Chicago with him. Maybe they would make his condo feel more like home.

    “W HAT DO YOU MEAN , you don’t have enough money? You just got paid.”
    The loud, surly male voice echoed over the background music in the drugstore, and Walker snapped to attention. That sounded like Nick.
    Walker shoved a twenty dollar bill at the kid who worked in the photo section. “Here, keep the change.”
    He grabbed his envelope of prints and hurried to the front of the store. A blond woman stood in line, but he didn’t need to see Nick standing beside her to know who it was. The shape of Jen’s back, the color of her hair, the curve of her hip seemed to be implanted in his head.
    He had a serious case of lust. For Jen Summers.
    She said something to Nick, and although Walker couldn’t hear her words, her sharp tone drifted back to him. Then Nick sneered at her and said loudly, “You’re not going to open it tomorrow. But I have a test tomorrow.”
    This wasn’t the kid he’d talked to about Stevie the other day. That boy