Free Suckers by Z. Rider

felt superimposed on it, like it was a ViewMaster slide. Click-click : here was his porch. Click-click : here was his back door.
    He set his bags down and fished for the right key.
    “Home” was a strange concept after all that traveling.
    He let himself into the kitchen. Four rooms opened right off it: bathroom around the corner, living room straight ahead, two bedrooms through doors at the other end. The place was clean, not a spot of dust. Of course: the price you paid for leaving your house keys with your mother. He wheeled his suitcase against the kitchen table, glanced at the mail sorted into neat piles: bills, personal, business, magazines, junk. A Pappy’s Pizza magnet clipped a note to the fridge door, pale blue paper with handwriting he identified from across the room. He slipped it free, reading off the list of ready-to-heat meals his mom had put in the fridge so he wouldn’t have to worry about cooking. She’d also had the landlord fix the flickering light fixture in the bathroom, and his great-aunt Cathy had had cataract surgery—maybe he could drop by and see her Sunday.
    “Thanks, Mom.” He folded the note.
    The junk mail went right into the trash, the magazines into the bathroom. The business stuff he didn’t even want to think about, and the personal mail amounted to a reminder to schedule a dental cleaning and a late birthday card from a girl he’d gone to high school with who managed to remember him on two or three card-giving occasions throughout the year. He sent her postcards from the road sometimes. She was married now, two kids and managing a restaurant in North Conway. Everybody was married now, it seemed like.
    With the mail processed, he headed into the bathroom, which was so vacant that his footfalls echoed off the porcelain tub. When he was finished there, he wandered across the kitchen and into his bedroom, looking it over—everything neat and dust free. In the living room, he dropped onto his couch.
    Three stories below, cars crept up the street. Someone in the building had their daytime TV turned up. A guy down on the sidewalk called to someone else out there and laughed, and up the street, probably at the auto body shop, metal clanked to no particular rhythm.
    What he didn’t hear was buzzing in his head.
    He lifted his hand in front of him.
    Still a little trembly. Thirty-some hours without sleep, two cups of Ma’s coffee. No surprise there.
    And no fucking buzzing. In the car with Ray, that had just been a fluke. His imagination.
    He dropped his hand and sat there with no idea what to do with himself, outside of the obvious: unpack, take a shower, crawl into bed. He was too beat to unpack, too wired to sleep.
    This was how it was, coming off the road, like you’ve been on a roller coaster, up, down, around and upside-down, and it’s crazy for three, four, six months at a stretch—then it comes to a stop.
    Dust motes hung in the air. Even they’d come to a stop.
    The apartment felt empty.
    It felt huge .
    Ray’d been the first to get his own place, a decade ago now, itching to get out on his own, live the glamorous flophouse life while he worked at a machine shop to fund his lifestyle of take-out food and beer, which he paid the old guys in the building to buy for him. The place, over on Pine Street, had had one bathroom per floor, no hot-plates allowed in the rooms, and each room came with a bed, a dresser, and a clothes bar mounted between two walls.
    Ray was happy as shit, going home to his own place at the end of every night. That was back when his dad was still alive and Buddy, who was going to college in town and working full time to pay for it, was living at home to save on expenses.
    Dan had thought Buddy had the right idea—his parents’ place was a little out of the way, out in Deerfield, but it was cheap, the food was free, and his mom made plenty of it. He had a car, he could get around. Why give up a good thing?
    Jamie’d wanted out of his parents’ house,