The Safety of Objects: Stories by A. M. Homes Read Free Book Online Page A

concrete front step. Across the dirt that was the front yard there were still pieces of wood that needed to be split and stacked. I picked up the axe. It felt heavier than I remembered. I raised it and went to work. About a half hour later Randy drove up.
    “Where’d you go?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Put shoes on,” he said. “Never work outside without shoes.”
    I followed him into the house. “I’m sorry for what I did last night,” I said. I’d been rehearsing it in my head all morning.
    He nodded.
    I went down the hall to get my shoes. Randy was in the kitchen making eggs for himself. “I said I was sorry.”
    “I hear you.” He scraped the eggs out of the pan and onto a plate. I kept looking at him and he looked back at me. “Did you finish all the wood?” I shook my head. Randy started to eat and I went outside and kept splitting and stacking.
    When the wood was chopped I went into my room and fell asleep. The
slap-slapping
sound of a basketball woke me up. Randy was dribbling down the hall. He stood in the doorway bouncing the ball. “Get up, Johnny,” he said. “We’re going.”
    “Where?”
    He shrugged and threw the ball at me, hard.
    I caught it. It was my ball. I hadn’t seen it since the night Randy picked me up. I held the ball for a minute and then put it down on the bed.
    “Take it with you,” he said.
    I followed him out to the car. “Do you know how to drive?”
    “I’m way too young.”
    “Never too young.” He moved the car seat as far forward as it would go. If I sat so I could see, my legs were nowhere near the pedals. “You’re too short,” Randy said. I slid over so he could drive. He pulled the seat release and the whole front seat slid backward.
    “Let’s go fishing again,” I said.
    “I don’t think so, Johnny,” he said and I was quiet for a long time. The road turned into highway and I could feel him making the car go faster. It was afternoon. The sun was starting to go down.
    “Where are we going?” I asked.
    He didn’t say anything for a while. “You’re not the kid I thought you’d be.”
    “What does that mean?”
    He turned off the highway and we were someplace I’d been before. I turned the basketball around on my lap.
    “I’m taking you back,” he said. He made a few turns and I knew where he was.
    “What’s wrong with me?”
    “You’re not the right kid. You’re not Johnny.” Randy pulled up to the curb right at the bottom of the hill below the basketball courts. This was the exact same place he’d parked when he came up to the courts and called me Johnny. “Get out,” he said. I sat there looking at the dashboard. “You’ve spent three days whining about calling your mother and going home. Now you’re home. Go on, get out.”
    “Why?”
    He leaned across me and opened the door on my side of the car.
    “Out,” he said, shoving my shoulder.
    I got out.
    Randy pulled away from the curb, turned the car around, and went back down the hill.
    I walked home, cutting through the same backyards as always. I walked the same way but everything felt different. All the things I’d always liked, knowing who lived where and what their dog’s name was, only made me feel worse. I went past clotheslines and instead of thinking it was funny to see Mrs. Perkins’s flowered underwear hanging out, I wanted to rip it down. I wanted to take everything down and tear it into a million pieces. I crossed through the Simons’ yard and into our backyard.
    Rayanne was there by herself, playing in my sandbox. She was thirteen years old, bigger than my mother, and she was playing in the sandbox. I stood there until she saw me. She looked at me and tried to jump up. She wanted to get up but she did it too fast and didn’t know what she was doing. She fell down and had to get up again. “Erol, Erol,” she said, galloping across the backyard. “Erol,” she said, but it came out sounding like “Error, Error.” She came toward me and I dropped my