The Cradle by Patrick Somerville

Author:Patrick Somerville [SOMERVILLE, PATRICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316072632
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-03-09T04:00:00+00:00

It took a solid three hours to get him falldown drunk. Twice Matt went into the house to vomit. His other trick to keep up with Darren was to just open a new beer whenever Darren opened a new beer and set his half-full beer down in the grass, as though he had finished it. Darren’s final musings on the night came in the form of a huge piss beside his grill and a comment about too many Hispanics moving into town. After that he sat back down in his chair, tilted to the side, and collapsed onto the ground.

Matt considered helping him up and dragging him into bed, but he was drunk, despite his best efforts not to be, and besides, since he’d learned about the kid, he’d been having more and more trouble holding back the urge to stand up and kick Darren in the jaw and watch as every one of his teeth fell out of his face. So it was fine that he would spend the night on the slab of concrete that constituted his porch. Matt let himself into the house and looked around for a desk or a file drawer. In the dining room he stumbled about and found a shoe box full of receipts, but that didn’t help him. He went upstairs to the bedroom. It was also neat—the bed was even made. Some bachelor. Matt looked through some drawers and again found nothing. He went back downstairs, to the kitchen. Beneath the silverware he found a drawer that had papers and postcards in it, along with a roll of outdated thirty-two-cent stamps. He shuffled through the cards; at the bottom, he found a birthday card, still tucked inside its envelope. He pulled it out.

On the front there was a pig. Inside, the bold writing said oink. Beneath it, in a scrawl, the message said, “Happy birthday, Darren. This will be a strong year for Pisces. Your mom.”

He slid the card back inside the envelope and looked at the return address. Rensselaer, Indiana. The postmark made it three years old.

Matt copied the address down onto a blank envelope he found, then put the card back at the bottom of the pile, then put the pile back right where he’d found it. Outside he looked disdainfully at Darren again, then went to the half-full beers he’d had around his feet and emptied them out, one by one, into the grass. He put the cans back beneath the chair. Finally, he turned out the light and left Darren in darkness, just a tangled curl of arms and legs. He walked around the outside of the house, got in his truck, and drove away.

He took special care to drive well on his way out of town. He was not sober, not by a long shot. Once he’d gotten a few miles east, he pulled over at a gas station and bought a thirty-two-ounce coffee and a bottle of No-Doz, ate three of the pills in the

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