Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan Page B

said the smell of liquor was so strong, he moved his candle to a higher table.”
    â€œHe was not my uncle at all,” Wilda whispered in Lewis’s perfect ear. “That was my first lie to you. He was a stranger.” She paused. “A bedraggled saint. Hauled me in off the street for no reason at all. Not a single question.
    â€œHe offered me a room and a job. Asked for nothing in return except that I don’t leave him alone in the evenings. An easy request, keeping away from darkness.” She put the back of her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t own a thing. Not a thing. It is a debt that almost strangles me.”
    Wilda shifted backwards, pulled the blanket off of Lewis, pushed it underneath his head. “Do you hear me?” she whispered. He opened and closed his mouth several times, desert tongue smacking the roof. “Do you hear me?”
    Watching his face closely, Wilda looked for some sign that her words had been absorbed. But his eyelids did not flutter, and there was only a playful dreamy smile at the corner of his lips. She kissed the tip of her finger, touched it to the end of his nose.
    Both palms on the coffee table, Wilda stood, waddled to their bedroom. Closed the door behind her. The air was icy, as though a wall was open to the outside. She waited there, in the darkness, for a long time. Listening to sounds that had grown no more familiar even though she’d been living there for more than a year. And now, she could identify something else, something new, mixed in among the creaking frame, few flapping shingles on the roof. She heard a whirring, her own voice reverberating her humiliation. Murky echoes that didn’t lose any momentum no matter how often they pinged off the walls, bore through her head. A mistake letting her secrets out into this open space. She recognized that now. Unloading her wretchedness inside a perfectly good home.
    She stayed in the blackness minutes longer. When her child kicked, she looked down, rubbed her stomach, whispered, “I don’t know what you were thinking. Choosing me.” Then she reached up her arm, swung it, caught the crocheted string hanging from the light fixture, and yanked.

12
    CONSTABLE LEWIS TRENCH could not turn a blind eye. Could not look away when he saw the young Stick boy taking a sharp turn, cut off the road and down onto a path that led towards Grayley River. Duane Stick’s behavior looked suspicious, glancing about, then darting away like a deer that suddenly realized it was out in the open. But it was the fishing rod draped over his shoulder, silver tip glinting in the sunlight, that made Lewis turn on his heel and follow.
    Lewis moved slowly through the woods, path soft and slippery, walking toe to heel, toe to heel. The trail that led to the river was narrow, and he shifted his body to avoid sappy spruce branches dirtying his jacket. Taking a deep breath of crisp autumn air, he could smell the forest floor, leaves and pinecones and needles breaking down into soil. There was the faintest scent of wood burning, acrid, but it made him think of homes and fireplaces and cords of cut wood, and he paused for a moment to take another deep breath, and recognize his good fortune. One day, he would bring his son here, into these woods, to this river, show him how to land a big one. But only when the time was right, when the salmon were in season.
    Wood burning replaced by the smell of cigarettes, human exhaust, and Lewis got moving again. Faster now as the rumble of the river was growing in intensity, and his steps would not be heard. As he came around the final turn, he saw the black water, fifty, sixty feet across, coursing happily over rounded stones, pockets of absolute calm tucked behind larger rocks, eddies twisting into eddies behind smaller ones. Lewis stayed just beyond the tree line, in the shadow of a row of fir trees, and he watched Duane.
    Skinny, jeans stuck into black lace-up boots, oversized