Free The Evening Hour by A. Carter Sickels

caps. Responsible to coal miners, to West Virginia, and to the environment . The commercial ended with a view of a big green mountain, then zoomed in on a herd of deer and a chickadee perched on a tree limb.
    â€œFuck you,” Cole said.
    He snapped off the TV and pressed the blinking red light on his answering machine and listened to his grandmother: “Cole, honey, I need to talk to you.” She’d been calling all week. He was tired of being the one she expected to fix everything. Didn’t want to hear about how he should go to church with her, didn’t want to hear about her prophecies or talk about giving up the land. He erased her voice. Then he stripped down to his underwear and stretched out on the sofa and thumbed through the pill book, a drug dealer’s bible, but there wasn’t anything that he didn’t already know.
    He went in his room and took out the safe and counted the money he’d made today, though he knew exactly how much was there. The bills felt soft in his hands, and he brought the green up to his nose, breathing in the inky smell. He had a little over twenty-five grand, more dough than his grandparents had ever had. Aside from what he gave to his grandmother and what went to his granddaddy’s doctor bills, Cole rarely spent the money. Charlotte was right to say that he had it. He didn’t know what he was saving for, but he liked knowing it was there.
    He added today’s earnings, pushing aside old-lady jewelry. It always surprised Cole how the residents, and their families, forgot to lock up their valuables. He didn’t worry about getting caught. If anyone actually noticed something was missing, which they never did, it would be easy enough to blame it on the Alzheimer’s patients, who were always wandering into other residents’ rooms and stealing family photos, eyeglasses. Once he’d discovered a half dozen pairs of dentures hidden in a closet.
    He leaned over his bed and took out an old Christmas cookie tin. He used to store the money in here, until Reese said, “Are you completely stupid?” and told him to buy a safe. Now Cole was extra careful. He never left his trailer or his truck unlocked. The junkies around here wouldn’t stop for anything, even if they had to pull a job way out in the hills. It was also why he didn’t sell out of his home.
    He pried the lid off and dug out the postcards, worn by years of handling. The first one arrived when Cole was three years old, and after that, they came sporadically—sometimes five in a month, sometimes one a year, but always another one. Las Vegas, Dallas, small towns in Michigan, Ohio. Cities and states he learned about in school, but to him were as far away as the North Pole. As a kid, he had looked at the postcards nearly every night, tracing a pencil over his mother’s slanted, loopy scrawl, mimicking the handwriting until it became his own.
    The trees in California are a lot bigger than the trees in Dove Creek. They almost touch the clouds. They are big enough to stand inside of. xoxox, Ruby
    The messages were all like that, short, simple, random. Never a return address. If his granddaddy had known about them, he would have burned them, the way he did her pictures. But Cole and his grandmother always retrieved the mail. The last postcard came when he was fifteen. There was never another.
    Under the postcards were a few photographs. One of Cole with his grandparents on his tenth birthday, the same year his mother had visited. The single picture of her that his grandmother had salvaged from the flames. He set them aside and picked up one of him and Terry Rose. They were at a party, a bonfire. Their arms slung over each other’s shoulders. Terry stood a head taller than Cole, his black curly hair cut in a mullet, the back trailing almost to his shoulders. They didn’t look like brothers, but when they were thirteen, they opened their skin with Terry’s