This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell Read Free Book Online

a few and could have called them on the phone for a nice conversation, but that seemed too rehearsed or staged or something. I liked the possibility of seeing something more random from them. I imagined what they were like with their guards down.
    I didn’t tell you about this because you might not have understood it and I wasn’t sure if I could explain.
    Some of the things I noticed on these drive-bys:
    Mimi likes to sit in her front yard and read on a beach towel, flexing her toes in the air every time she turns a page. Diane leaves her shades open all the time, sometimes paying bills at her dining room table or talking on the phone. Annette is always on the couch with her new husband, the TV light flickering on her face.
    I drove by slowly, sometimes parked for a while, and wondered if I’d had any effect on them and if I somehow haunted them. I wondered how people carry on.
    I did this with you too, but you didn’t know it. It was before we lived together, whenever we got into fights. But I could only see your faint shadow in the window, maybe pacing or dancing with Maxine. I wanted to park my car, walk up closer, and peep between the curtains. I stayed in the car, though. If I rolled the windows down, I thought I’d be able to hear something, smell something, or feel some little clue in the air between us.
    …
    Sometimes you got long letters from your aunt Lydia in Missouri. After your mom died, she tried to become a surrogate mom for you. You were twenty-two years old at the time and your conservative aunt just annoyed you, for the most part. But eventually you started to like her a little and use her as a long-distance confidante. A couple of times a year, you’d get a bulky nine-by-twelve envelope in the mail from her. It would include photographs, clippings of uptight advice columns and op-eds, and a letter of at least twenty pages. Sometimes there was also a fifty-dollar bill, folded up and concealed inside a Doublemint gum wrapper. Aunt Lydia did not have email because she said the government controls it.
    You did your best to write a long reply back to her, sometimes taking a couple of months to do so. You also included various news clippings and photographs, but no cash.
    You locked yourself in the bathroom one night, rereading a new letter and replying to her. You came out once and asked me impatiently to look up a word in the dictionary for you.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Rancor,” you said.
    I’d heard the word before but was not sure what it meant. I thumbed through our paperback dictionary. “It says: Bitter, long-lasting resentment .” I closed the book and looked up. You were back in the bathroom already. “Wait a second,” I said. “Use it in a sentence.”
    You didn’t reply.
    “Why do you need to know that word?” I asked through the door.
    “Oh, nothing,” you said.
    “Are you okay in there?”
    “Almost done!”
    “Tell Lydia I said hello.”
    No response.
    “Can I go to the bathroom?”
    “No.”
    …
    It took Vince a while to outgrow his wizard phase. He read about them constantly for almost five years and had wizard-themed birthday parties for three years in a row. He started dressing like a wizard too. He even got Maxine to play along. Sometimes we saw them, dressed in capes and odd pointy hats, walking around the neighborhood. They would go to the big grocery store up the street and look at the mass-market books about magical demons and other ridiculous creatures.
    One day I saw Maxine putting eyeliner on Vince and then they followed me around the apartment for several hours, asking if they could hypnotize me. I didn’t know if they wanted to look into my past or glimpse the future. I finally let them do it and I actually fell asleep.
    When I woke up, they looked scared and then avoided me for the rest of the weekend.
    …
    There was a big rainstorm and our electricity was out all night. We all walked around with flashlights in our hands. Vince had a toy hard hat