Fever House by Keith Rosson

Author:Keith Rosson [Rosson, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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He went over to the Regal Arms a few nights later. He and Katherine with a standing hangout time, every Thursday. Go for a walk, even if the weather was shitty, try to expand the ring as much as she was able to. Then go grab sushi, pizza, his mom getting gently spritzed on a couple glasses of wine, Nick there to help her avoid her dipping her toes too deep into the bad memories of the past. He could tell that Katherine had grown more insular since he moved out. He seriously doubted that she was leaving the apartment much at all when he wasn’t there, even just to pop down to the convenience store a few blocks away for a bottle of passingly decent wine or some woefully overpriced toilet paper.

He walked into the lobby that night, same as ever, that familiar sense of home rattling in his breast—how many thousands of times has he walked through these doors, gone to the elevator and then decided to take the stairs, knowing it would be faster? Stared at these light fixtures, this dark molding? Nodded, just like he did now, at Mr. Contrallo, coming out of some unit or another, gently muttering to himself. That familiar scent in the stairwell—carpet cleaner trying its hardest to cover up the tinge of mold, age, the passage of years. Then down the hall to his mother’s place—his place, really, given that Katherine kept insisting she’d do something with his room at some point, but just hadn’t gotten to it yet. Then the knock on the apartment door, still weird after living there pretty much his entire childhood.

Still thinking about that guy, Peach, the weight of the pistol in his hand, he’d knocked on the front door to the apartment and opened it up to find a bloody footprint on the carpet. A scattering of them really, red smears that led from the bathroom to Katherine’s bedroom, where he could faintly hear music playing.

“Mom?” he called out. The way his heart just dropped into his feet, that cold feeling rushing through him.

“Hey,” Katherine said, sounding weary, tired. “I’m in here, hon.”

He found her lying on her bed in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. One foot was on a stack of pillows, wrapped in a coral pink hand towel that was spotted with blood.

“Think I had too much to drink,” Katherine said sheepishly.

“What happened,” Nick said, already putting it together.

“Stepped on a wineglass in the bathroom.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see?”

Katherine winced, her wet hair still fanned out on the pillow. “So dumb. I just stepped right on it.”

Nick gingerly peeled off the towel, his mother’s face tightening in apprehension. He tried not to look alarmed at the red, slashed mess that was her heel.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s fine,” Nick said, a little queasy. A shard the size and shape of a ping pong ball, wickedly curved like that, was still embedded in the flesh, along with a bunch of other smaller pieces. Nick, eyes furrowed, grasped the bigger piece and pulled it out, Katherine hissing in surprise.

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