Free Elizabeth Basque - Medium Mysteries 01 - Echo Park by Elizabeth Basque Page A

to be a good big brother, and my sisters and I got really close.”
    “ Not your dad?”
    “ No. For a few years, Dad tried to find his way, despite being lost, same as we were. He started working two jobs, to replace Mom’s income, and spent a lot of time down at the local pool hall when he wasn’t working. He never even ate at home anymore. He just put thirty dollars on the kitchen counter every Friday and then we fed ourselves, as best we could. We never shopped at that grocery store again. We went to one further away, so we didn’t have to cross at that intersection, ya know?”
    I nodded encouragingly.
    “ Dad. He did everything not to have to see the girls because they looked just like her, you know? They were like mini-Moms. He couldn’t hardly look at them without saying something gruff that would send them into tears. He pushed them away when they needed their daddy to hold them. Even more than how he treated me, what hurt the most was what he did to the girls: shut them out, rejected them.”
    “ Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Mack, taken aback. His face was stricken with compassion.
    “ Shh ,” I said gently, looking in Mack’s direction for a moment, then turned back to Michael. “What about school, Michael?”
    “ We did our best. Our mom used to check our homework, but as we got older, homework got harder. I had to help my sisters and sometimes, I didn’t get my homework done. But theirs was always complete. If we had time, at night, they wanted me to sing them to sleep, like Mom used to. It was as if I sang the song that she used to sing to us before bed, then that was a piece of her that would never die.”
    Tears were in Michael’s eyes.
    “What song?” I asked.
    “ Mr. Sandman . Do you know it?”
    “ Sure. Great old song.”
    “ That was Mom’s theme song, I don’t know why. She said everyone had a theme song, something that meant the world to them. And that was hers.”
    I nodded. “I believe in personal theme songs, too.”
    “What’s yours?” Carla asked me.
    “ Me? What a Feeling by Irene Cara. Don’t laugh,” I said to Mack when I sensed his silent amusement. I turned back to Michael. “Sorry. Continue, please.”
    “ I sang it for my sisters, Lily and Rose. Night after night. It was keeping a piece of Mom in our lives, a piece nobody could take away. A damn… song became this anthem of our family, this glue between me and my sisters. That’s all we had left of her. We clung to it like a prayer.” He gulped and cleared his throat.
    “ Fast forward a couple of years,” I said.
    “ That’s when the trouble started. I mean, not as bad as losing Mom, but sort of where I fell from grace, even in Dad’s eyes and he was barely around. Things started to get worse between us. He worked hard and my grades were crap. I didn’t do any homework at that point. I was mowing lawns after school to make money for batons and costumes for the girls because twirling made them so happy and they were so cute and good at it. I paid for the lessons. Dance lessons were too expensive, so they twirled. You can’t outgrow a baton like you can shoes. So I mowed lawns.”
    I smiled. “But you started getting in trouble?”
    “Oh, yeah. I was twelve, like Carla is now.” He nodded at her. “Hey, kid.”
    “ Hey,” she said back, ever so softly. “Why did you do bad things, Michael?”
    He grimaced. “It was easy, that’s why. I hooked up with some questionable kids after school at a friend’s house, a friend I met in detention for not turning in my homework. Him, for smoking pot in the boy’s room.”
    “Oh, no,” Julie said, as if she saw the turn his life was taking in front of her eyes.
    “ I…got high for the first time. At twelve, I felt like an old man, already. Weed helped me relax from my responsibilities, and I could laugh with the other kids. The stoner kids were nice, not like any other kids I had ever met. I hadn’t laughed in years, you know? These kids were fun,