The Narcissist's Daughter by Craig Holden Read Free Book Online

stopped in the living room before the stacks of magazines and papers and cardboard boxes and the filled ashtrays and the empty beer cans on Brigman’s TV tray. I stood very still. The house should have been as quiet as the street but there was a noise in the kitchen, then Brigman came in holding a can of Schlitz. It could have been he’d called in sick or taken a vacation day but it wasn’t. It went through me as a physical shock, another piece of evidence of the slippage of Brigman, which had been going on now for six years.
    He was younger than Sandy by some years and never felt like Dad to me, even after they got married, nor do I think he wanted to. I couldn’t go around calling him Step-Dad, so it’d just stayed Brigman and we’d spent much of our time together since then circling, grappling, I suppose, with the question of who we were to each other: competitors for Sandy’s attention, friends, quasi-brothers, sometimes I guess even father and son. But there was no single word for it.
    He said, “Hey, Little Syd.” (My full name is Daniel Sydney Redding, in honor of my vanished blood father, Sandy’s first brief husband, who was, I once pestered her into telling me, an Aussie.)
    After the accident, though it must not have been easy, Sandy was able to cover us with her income. Nothing seemed to Chloe and me to change really except that Brigman wasn’t there. When he got out, he didn’t return to the plant and when he finally did take a part-time job at a small stamping shop at a fraction of his former wage he only held it for five months. Donny got him on at UPS after that; he stayed a year. Each subsequent job seemed to take him farther from what he knew how to do, which was to make machinery. He currently worked on the loading dock at a nearby IGA, but that was now apparently done, too, because they’d told him a week earlier that if he missed another day for whatever reason he was gone.
    “You hungry?” he said. “I can do some eggs and pancakes. Coffee.”
    “I ate,” I said, though I hadn’t. “I’ve got class. Got to get some sleep.”
    He wore a white V-necked T-shirt and a pair of old green work trousers that sagged on him, and I saw in the morning light as I had not noticed somehow before how much his hair had thinned and lightened and that his several days’ growth of beard looked thinner, too, and patchy. The skin on his red hands was flaked and cracked, and the flesh on his arms hung sadly. Before the accident he had always been about building up in whatever ways he could, but it took that away from him and now I could see, as if it had come suddenly, that he was an old man or near to it.
    He looked happy to see me, though, as if this all happening in the morning instead of at night made it new somehow. He set the can down, took a pack of Marlboros from his pants pocket, and slipped one out. He held it pinched between his thumb and middle finger, the ember next to his palm, and said, “You doin’ all right?”
    “I’m all right, Brigman.”
    “Work and school, I mean. You holdin it together?”
    “I always have.”
    “Not really.”
    “What do you want me to say?”
    “Nothin. If you need some help—”
    “You’ll give it to me?”
    “Try.”
    “With what?”
    He watched as I went over to the staircase, then said, “Syd.”
    “Yeah?”
    “It matters you do good at it and get out of here.” He looked around at the dingy room full of trash and the dingy broken house, all the dingy houses on the dingy streets in this forgotten place. “I know it’s been tough. Just do what you have to do, whatever it is.”
    The ceiling creaked. I looked up.
    He said, “Chloe stayed home, too.”
    “Why?”
    He exhaled and peered at me through the smoke, his eyes narrow and mean-looking as they sometimes got.
    “She sick?” I said.
    “No.”
    “What’s going on?”
    He shook his head. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
    I went up and found her not in her room, which was next to