Read After Hours for Free Online

world. A place where
     they feel they understand their spot in the pecking order, unlike on the outside.
     But it’s not ideal. After years of the same gray pajamas, same meals, same views out
     the same windows . . . Sounds like prison. To me, anyhow, to lots of those guys. But
     it keeps the ones like Don safe, I guess.”
    “I hope that’s not how it feels, working there—like it’s a prison.”
    “Not when you get to clock out every night, get paid and have the freedom to drive
     to a bar once the working day’s done, order whatever you want to eat. Leave the job
     behind the second you wipe your name off that board.”
    “I guess.” But I worried it’d feel like a sentence to me. I’d chosen this job, but
     out of duty and under duress. I’d be going home to just another ward, practically,
     as long as I stayed in the transitional residence, and playing nurse on the weekends
     for free, trying to enact order to combat my sister’s chaos. Would I ever feel like
     I was off duty? Would I ever leave the day behind when the door to Starling clicked
     shut at my back? Right now, I couldn’t imagine it.
    The outskirts of a small city appeared beyond the fields. Buildings drew closer, revealing
     their wear. The sun was just meeting the horizon, ripening the clouds to a warm mauve.
    Kelly drove us past a huge factory, windows shuttered in plywood, its vast parking
     lot eerily absent of cars. Corroded wisps of razor wire coiled along the top of the
     chain-link fence.
    “You been to Darren before?” Kelly asked.
    “No. Do you live here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You like it?” I asked, as another block of urban decay slid past.
    “It’s a shithole.”
    “Oh.”
    “Former factory and mill city—no shock—now it’s caught someplace between ghost town
     and ghetto, with a little river of civilization running through the middle, paying
     taxes.”
    “Is it dangerous?”
    “Parts are, sometimes. But mainly it’s just quiet. We got substance abuse issues and
     the crime that goes with it, but not as bad as other places, since public services
     are practically nonexistent here. But you can buy a two-bedroom house for twenty grand,
     so here I am.”
    “You’re not really selling me on it.”
    “Wasn’t trying to.”
    “Did you grow up around here?” I asked.
    “Not really, but it’s a lot like where I did.”
    “Where?”
    “Hamtramck.”
    I sort of knew where that was. A poor city outside Detroit, crippled like so many
     in the state in the wake of plant closures. “I didn’t grow up too far away. On the
     other side of Dearborn.”
    Kelly nodded, his stern face looking different in the sky’s pink cast and the glow
     from the dash—somber, if not soft. “Some people grow up on the ocean, by the mountains,
     places where it snows or places with palm trees. That’ll always be the kind of stuff
     they want surrounding them. Guess I’m hardwired for cracked concrete and rust stains.”
    He turned us down a more civilized block, past a hardware shop and a karate studio,
     an AT&T store, other signs of life. There was a heart beating inside the city’s bones,
     if faintly. He parked along the curb outside a bar called Lola’s and we swung open
     our doors, slammed them in unison. The town was half-dead but the bar had a pulse.
     I could hear it thumping to the rhythm of classic rock and loud conversations. Kelly
     held the door for me.
    The patrons seemed lively enough for a Monday night, though there were plenty of places
     to sit. Back in manufacturing’s heyday, it would’ve surely been packed with factory
     workers. Kelly brushed past me and I followed him to the bar.
    “Heya, Kel,” said the bartender, tossing two napkins on the wood before us. He gave
     me a lukewarm nod and the most cursory male assessment.
    “White wine,” Kelly said, shocking me speechless. Just as well, as the bartender didn’t
     ask for my order yet. So my companion had a girl’s thirst to match his