The Cemetery Boys by Heather Brewer Read Free Book Online Page B

of yours teach him anything?”
    â€œNo, really. It’s very nice to meet you.” It was ridiculous the way she went on as if I hadn’t just spoken to her. Like maybe if she ignored my presence long enough, I’d evaporate into thin air. Maybe that’s what she wanted. But it wasn’t what she was getting. We were here now. I was here. Like it or not, we were stuck together.
    She snorted in derision, as if she’d heard my inner observation and didn’t like it any more than I did. “Clean up my yard, Harold. I want everything looking its usual way by this afternoon.”
    She didn’t wait for a response. She simply went back toher room and closed the door with a loud click—not a slam, exactly. Nothing so noisy. Just enough of a sound to make her displeasure known. Once she’d gone, I grunted. “Wow. I want to be her when I grow up.”
    My dad shot me a look that was either telling me to watch my mouth or, more likely, pleading with me not to be like his mother in even the smallest sense. I said, “Sarcasm, Dad. Don’t worry. I’m starting to understand why you left this place and stayed away for so long.”
    â€œYour grandmother and I fail to see eye to eye on many things. But let’s just try and make the best of a bad situation. She may warm up to you in time.”
    â€œYeah. Maybe.” That was what I said. But what I thought was, “The hell she will.”
    The fact was, there was no pleasing some people because some people didn’t ever want to be pleased. I got a gnawing feeling in my stomach that said my grandmother belonged to that club. But screw her. I had had a life before her and I’d have a life after. Only six months stood between me and the age of majority, and if my dad didn’t move us out of her crappy house before then, I was gone—off to college, or anywhere else far away from my family and their screwed-up problems. Away from my bitter grandmother and her pursed lips and whatever ideas she’d already made up her mind about when it came to me.
    My dad went outside to clear stuff from the front lawn, and with a sigh, I turned back to the task at hand. The boxes in my room weren’t going to break themselves down.
    â€œHarold.” She’d stuck her head out her door again, but just long enough to bark an order disguised as a request. “It would be nice, since I’m letting you live here rent-free if you and the boy could do some maintenance around the house to repay me. You can start by scraping the old caulk from the windows and redoing it. Don’t make a mess, now.”
    She disappeared again before he could say anything. The look in his eyes as he dropped another stack of cardboard in the recycling pile was one I hated to see. It was a look of defeat.

chapter 5
    The outside of Tom’s Hardware was plain and painted cinder-block gray, with the name written out on the simplest of signs hanging over the glass front door. The inside was cramped, overstuffed with the kinds of manly-man things that I largely didn’t give a crap about. Buckets of various-sized screws were everywhere. And it had this weird hardware-store smell, like grease and loneliness. But that didn’t seem to bother the four old men who were crowded around the cash register, talking to the old man standing behind the counter—presumably Tom.
    This group of old men looked vaguely similar to the onethat had been outside the gas station when we’d first arrived in town, but there was no way I could pick either group out of a lineup. They were all old. They were all men. One of these guys had a kind of mustache or something. At this point, all I knew was that we’d been working on my grandmother’s stupid windows for a week now, and my dad had sent me here to buy more caulk. I had snickered like an idiot when he told me to buy the big tube.
    Who knew that a week could stretch into an eternity when