He was too old to “play nice.” I made five of them, Dominick-four for our dessert and an extra one just for you. We’d been begging her for weeks to buy that canned cream… We were fifth-graders now. Ma had left me pudding that day: butterscotch pudding and whipped cream in a squirt can. Our supper- beef stew- was simmering on the stove the kitchen windows dripped with moisture from the bubbling pot. Wearing ( dungarees, Old Yeller sweatshirt). Which, come to think of it, was what people did when they drowned… “ It’s not going to be okay,” I told Joy. What had Felice said? Believe in fate? Go with the flow? Maybe that was the big cosmic joke: you could spend your whole life banging your head against the wall and all it boiled down to was fortune-cookie philosophy. Instead of answering her, I rubbed at the tears. Gets locked up in maximum-security hell for a year and takes it with a stiff upper lip. Now I was the crybaby and Thomas was the stoic. Cross Dominick Birdsey and he might blow up at you, might come out swinging-but you were never going to see him cry like that pansy-ass brother of his… But ever since I’d fallen off Rood’s roof- had come bubbling back up from hell or wherever it was that the morphine had taken me- all’s I could do was cry. All our lives, he’d been the crybaby and I’d been the tough guy. He’d taken the news stoically, Sheffer said. Maybe that’s what Thomas was doing down there at Hatch, too.
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