Free Crooked by Laura McNeal Page B

gathering around her mouth in the way it did when she felt like she might cry against her will. She heard tennis shoes squeaking behind her and glanced back. It was Bruce.
    Clara kept walking, but he caught up to her by the elevator, where a trembling man in pajamas stood braced by a walker. The walls were pink and lavender, like the floor. Clara looked at the man’s red corduroy slippers while Bruce’s words streamed past her. “Hey,” he said, “what happened wasn’t Amos’s fault. That wasn’t our Amos. Listen to me. He wasn’t trying to do that.”
    Clara ignored him. The elevator opened, and the trembling man started to move uncertainly forward behind his walker. To Clara’s surprise, Bruce held the elevator open for him. The trembling man inched his way inside and nodded at Bruce, and Clara stepped in, but Bruce still kept his hand on the door.
    â€œIt wasn’t Amos’s fault,” he said. “It musta been the drugs that made him do that. Or maybe the anesthetic.”
    â€œOh, piddle!” Clara said, stealing a phrase from her mother, then flushed to hear how silly it sounded, which annoyed her even more. She slapped Bruce’s hands from the door and pushed the first-floor button. The doors closed like a curtain, and Bruce was gone.
    The trembling man in the elevator didn’t say anything. Breathing took his attention instead, and the glow of the lighted numbers as the car went downward. A smell of disinfectant filled up the elevator car, and when the doors finally slid open, Clara gasped for air before turning back to help the man to a bench in the lobby. It was he who smelled of Lysol. That was one surprise. Another was the sight of Eddie Tripp sitting in the lobby with a magazine open on his lap, his face turned up toward the television screen.
    When he glanced her way, his expression jumped from boredom to real interest. “What are you doing here?” he asked after what felt like a full ten seconds of staring, during which time Clara became keenly aware of her nose. (
She stared crookedly,
she thought.
She smiled lamely but crookedly.
)
    â€œNothing,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
    Eddie’s grin had a sneering aspect to it. “They get more cable channels here,” he said, pointing toward the TV.
    Clara understood this was a joke, but she was too uncomfortable to laugh. In the next moment, Eddie was standing up and putting his hands in his pockets. “Hey, you want a Philly cheese steak?” he asked. “I know a place where they make a great Philly cheese steak, and I got a car.”
    â€œYou drive?”
    Eddie grinned. “Yeah, I’m sixteen, remember? The oldest kid at Melville.” His grin stretched wider. “I flunked kindergarten a couple times.” A pause. “So how about it? Can I talk you into a Philly cheese steak?”
    â€œI’m not that hungry,” Clara said, uneasy with his asking and yet weirdly flattered, as she had been the first time Eddie Tripp took the seat in front of her on the bus and fixed his light blue eyes on her face. “I can’t,” Clara said.
    Eddie smiled. “‘I can’t’ is what a girl who doesn’t want to start living her life would say, but the truth is, you can. It’s as simple as saying, ‘Sure. Why not?’”
    Clara ignored this. Eddie kept walking beside her as she went past the emergency room. It seemed funny, walking with somebody and not saying anything, so Clara said, “How come you’re at the hospital?”
    Eddie’s eyes shifted slightly. “To see my grandma.”
    â€œYour grandma,” Clara said doubtfully.
    â€œYeah, she’s got Wilkinson disease, but don’t ask me what it is.”
    â€œAnd that’s why you’re here?”
    Eddie’s grin turned somehow cockier. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” They walked a few