Brother and Sister by Edwin West Read Free Book Online Page B

wait.
     
    Paul spent most of his waiting time with Danny McCann, and his days rapidly assumed a pattern. He got out of bed around two in the afternoon, washed and dressed, and made himself a cup of coffee. Most of the time, Angie was in the house when he awoke, working or reading or watching television, but since he invariably woke up with a hangover, there wasn’t much conversation between them.
     
    Having downed the cup of coffee and taken two aspirin tablets, Paul would then sit and watch television till five or thereabouts, when Angie would make lunch for him. He would eat alone at the kitchen table, since she had eaten her lunch hours before and wasn’t ready for dinner yet, and then he would leave the house, going first to Joe King’s Happi-Tyme Tavern to meet Danny. Then the two of them would spend the night bar-hopping.
     
    They ran across a lot of the people Paul had known back in high school and in the days before he’d enlisted in the Air Force, and they made the rounds in groups of from two to twelve. They always wound up at an after-hours place in the city called the Black Hat. Then they drove back to Thornbridge in Danny’s car, and Paul rolled into the sack around five or six in the morning.
     
    A couple of times, he and Danny parted company early in the evening, and then met again well after midnight at one of the local Thornbridge bars. Those were the times when Danny was anxious to go pick up a girl. He wanted Paul to come along with him so they could pick up two girls, but Paul begged off every time. When Danny asked for a reason Paul merely got sullen and angry and refused to talk with him.
     
    The thing was, he didn’t know exactly what his motives were. Actually, there was no one clear-cut reason for his not wanting to go quail hunting with Danny. There were a number of reasons, most of which he hardly suspected himself.
     
    In the first place, and most obviously, there was Ingrid. Or, rather, the memory of Ingrid. That fiasco had been too recent for him to want to get himself involved, emotionally or physically, with any other girl. Once burned, he was twice shy.
     
    Secondly -- not so much a reason as an excuse -- there was the fact that his parents had been dead less than two weeks. To go playing around so soon after their death would be, to say the least, in bad taste.
     
    The final -- and perhaps most important -- reason he didn’t understand himself, at least, not on a conscious level. It was more complicated than the other two and concerned both his parents and his sister.
     
    In essence he felt he was making use of his sister and the death of his mother and father. Angie didn’t need him, not to the extent he was claiming in his application for discharge. Hell, she would be going to work pretty soon. And Thornbridge was full of uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, all of them a hell of a lot more capable of watching out for Angie than Paul was.
     
    He remembered, when he was just a kid, hearing his father at the dinner table one time, talking about this woman who worked in the office of Uncle James Dane’s trucking company. It seems her husband had run out on her a few years before and, according to Paul’s father, it was easy to see why the poor guy had up and left. But he had given her four kids before leaving, so even though she had a job she was collecting relief for the kids because they were all under age. And Paul’s father said it was a shame the way that woman treated those kids. He said it was a sure bet she would’ve left the kids, too, except that she was staying around because of the relief money she got for the kids. Which she used on anything in the world except the kids, according to Paul’s father.
     
    She didn’t feed them enough, and only the cheapest food, and she got them all second-hand clothes and made them wear them till they were practically worn through, and none of the kids ever had so much as a nickel to spend on themselves. It was a