Free Son of Destruction by Kit Reed Page A

that’s coming down on him? Davis brought it on himself. She found out about him and Aunt Gayle before Mom did, you know, from that time they flew out to California? Mom dyed her hair and bought outfits for the trip – gaudy colors that she hated, so she must have known something was up. You’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to see it. Like, from the minute they walked into the house in Toluca Lake. A blind wombat would pick up on the loaded looks, that cunty smile on Gayle, and if Steffy didn’t know it for sure, by the time they got back from a day in Ventura she did. Gayle took Stef and her folks and her second husband Clueless Ed and their assorted kids for a day at the beach. After lunch she sent Ed off for charcoal and some obscure item that she knew would take him forever to find, sunscreen SPF 2000, maybe, or eye of newt. That left Steffy and her sort-of cousins beached while Gayle took Dad body surfing and Mom sat on a rock looking confused.
    That night Mom went to bed early and everybody else sat on the back deck of the house Ed built, listening to Gayle and Dad talk about the great times they had when they were kids back at the family camp in Myrtle Beach, the cousins just played and
played
. Grampa McCall was Superintendent of Schools in Columbia, South Carolina, and Dad never lets you forget it. He built the camp so the generations could gather, Dad said, and Aunt Gayle said,
We had the best time
. It was like an opera or some half-assed sentimental duet that went on and on.
    Dad hardly noticed when Mom stuck her head out the upstairs window, he and Aunt Gayle laughed and talked while Clueless Ed cleaned up and toasted marshmallows for the kids, and they talked on while the kids lit sparklers and ran around screaming in the dark and they went on talking instead of putting the kids to bed, which they were supposed to do, so Steffy was up almost all night. After all, Mom said later, it’s the only thing I asked you to do. This was a first in both households, surprise. The forgetting. They got laughing so hard that around midnight Mom came out in her bathrobe and rasped, ‘Keep it down.’
    After that trip Mom bought a whole ’nother wardrobe; she even lost a couple of pounds, but by then it was too late.
    No time for that now, Abernathy
, Steffy thinks, Dad’s joke.
    She is in a really strange mood. If she goes home any time between now and 5:30, when her folks are out the door for Patty Kalen’s engagement party, they’ll drag Steffy, even though the whole town knows Patty and her dad are hardly speaking because he was so drunk that he tried to pick her up outside Mook’s Bar. ‘You’re going,’ Mom said. ‘Everybody who’s anybody is. After all, that poor girl lost her mother. Cecilia Kalen was one of our nearest and dearest.’
    Steffy couldn’t say,
Mr Kalen creeps me out
, although it’s true. ‘Do I have to?’
    ‘Yes. We’re giving it.’
    By ‘we,’ she does not mean her and Dad, Nenna means her and her girlfriends that she hangs out with because he and Mom live in separate worlds.
    It’s like Dad is here, but he isn’t, and Steffy has no idea whose fault this is. If she goes home now he will be lying in wait. He doesn’t pounce, it’s more like lurking. Or melting into a puddle that you could fall in, which he’s been doing a lot this week. Get too close and you’ll sink. He schlumps around with every line in his body screaming
Hit Me
, unless it’s
Forgive Me
, and Mom . . . Mom will tell her, ‘Go put on something decent, you’re not going out looking that.’
    She’s been to those parties, and those parties are crap. So are her parents, both of them. It’s crap being with them right now.
    She’s better off here.
    This is her place, if Steffy has a place, but late afternoon sun chased the last bit of shade off the roof and now it’s too hot.
Hell with it. I’m not moving until the party’s started and I’m sure Mom and Dad are gone
. It’s harder to breathe