The Winters in Bloom by Lisa Tucker Read Free Book Online Page A

about to go on stage.
    He didn’t say a word; he just stood up and headed toward the exit. Amy was crying, but Peanut came over to tell her it was time to play again, and he hugged her and told her it was for the best. “We’re musicians. We can’t get entangled with day giggers, even cool ones like Zach.”
    Maybe he was joking about the stupid day giggers remark, but it infuriated Kyra. She left to find Zach. He was walking down Nichols Road toward the parking garage. She caught up with him right as he was putting the key in the door of his old yellow Jeep.
    “She doesn’t deserve you,” she whispered, and then she impulsively reached out and folded him in her arms. When she felt his shoulders moving, she realized he was crying.
    “I love her,” he stammered. “I can’t stand to see her do this.”
    Kyra thought by “this” he meant Amy breaking up with him. But no. He said something about Amy being in trouble, and Kyra figured out that he was worried about her sister. That was why he was crying. Kyra admired him so much at that moment. He was such a good person. She offered to go to his apartment with him because she knew he really needed someone to talk to.
    He lived in a basement apartment not far from Kyra and Amy’s place. Kyra had never been there, but Amy had told her it felt like a cave and she was right. It was almost as dark as the bar, with only tiny windows near the ceiling and wood paneling on every wall. Zach said it had been furnished with stuff the owners of the house above him didn’t want. A beige Formica dinette set with two metal chairs. A brown-and-gray striped couch that was sagging in the middle. A yellowing white ottoman. A three-legged desk with a stack of schoolbooks serving as the fourth leg. A mattress on the floor in the corner, with the sheets twisted up and the blanket kicked to the bottom.
    “I’m planning to move somewhere better at the end of the summer,” he said. “I just need to work and save up a deposit.”
    “It’s fine,” Kyra said. She sat down on the far end of the couch to avoid the quicksand of the middle sag. “Our apartment isn’t perfect, either. Don’t worry.”
    Kyra and Amy’s apartment was furnished with used stuff, too, from a thrift store, but the difference was their place looked pretty. They’d bought wicker baskets and wicker laundry hampers to store their books and clothes and shoes, and they’d painted their junk furniture white, to make the place look airy. They’d made their own curtains from cloud-blue sheets. They’d covered all the walls with the musician posters Amy loved, and the clocks Kyra was always picking up at garage sales. She had seventeen clocks at this point: the biggest, an old white one rimmed in black, three feet across, that used to hang in the front hallway of some elementary school; the smallest, no bigger than a quarter with cardboard hands, painted green and curved like fingernail cuttings. Her favorite present for her nineteenth birthday was a clock that Zach had found for her: a plastic raccoon with the time in his belly. On the hour, the raccoon’s eyes moved and his tail swayed back and forth: twelve sways for twelve o’clock, etc. He said it was corny but Kyra thought it was perfect and she’d hung it over by her cuckoos and her clock with the lion’s mane.
    Zach mumbled something about how much more comfortable he’d always felt in Kyra and Amy’s apartment, which Kyra thought was an obvious reference to how comfortable he’d felt being with Amy. When he got out an unopened bottle of whiskey from the metal cabinet over his sink, she didn’t disapprove. Of course he needed a little something to drown his sorrows. His heart was broken.
    After he sat down on the other end of the couch, he poured the whiskey into two Welch’s jelly glasses. “Last night, I told her she has to stop,” he said. “I told her if she didn’t agree to quit, I was going to have to do it. She begged me not to, but I said,