Read Crows for Free Online Page B

Robert asked.
    â€œDreading it.”
    â€œNow, Dave,” Evelyn said. “We may be regaining a son.”
    â€œBut losing a den,” Robert said, finishing for his father, who nodded and smiled, pleased he and his son thought alike.
    â€œDidn’t you save your money?” Dave asked.
    â€œSure. But not enough to live without a job,” Robert said. His father’s question, with its gross ignoring of the facts, annoyed him no end.
    His mother went over to turn down the stereo. Dave watched her move away. Her feet were bare and the cloth of her robe swished as she walked.
    â€œWhat are your job prospects?” Dave asked.
    â€œNone.”
    â€œYou’ve got to work,” Evelyn said.
    â€œI have no marketable skills.”
    â€œYou’re a sportswriter,” Dave said shrilly. “A damn good one.”
    â€œThere aren’t many sportswriting jobs left in Mozart,” Robert said.
    â€œSo leave town!” Dave exclaimed.
    Robert slipped past the two of them. He always wished for a brother or sister in moments such as this, someone to share the burden of their attention; someone to share the sense he was butting in.
    Two empty wine glasses sat on the counter beside the kitchen sink. Bits of cork clung stickily to the inner rim of one. They had each had a glass of wine, then went to wrap in each other’s arms on the couch and listen to music. In blundered their only child.
    He took the wine from the refrigerator and poured some into one of the dirty glasses. He drank it leaning against the counter, his legs crossed, pleased perversely to be horning in on his parents’ good time.
    Evelyn and Dave stood in the doorway. They might have been trying to block him from penetrating back into the house, his only way out the back door.
    His parents’ store was in a poor location, at the very end of Booth Street, which faced away from the heart of downtown Mozart, away from Oblong Lake. The choicest locations were on the lake road, where the summer tourist shoppers and towns­people with money to spend strolled the wide walks. Cigar’s, four blocks in and the last store on a dead-­end street, was not in a location where shoppers would come upon it in the course of a day and decide to buy.
    But poor business did not upset Robert’s parents and he was in college before he learned why. His mother owned the store; her name was Evelyn Pine when she met Dave Cigar. The favored only child of the Waukesha Pines, she was the recipient of a moderate inheritance when her grandmother, and some years later her parents, passed away. She had bought the store for Dave as a wedding present, and ever since he had been running countless going concerns out of it, and into the ground.
    Dave was a short, wiry man with thinning hair, a paunch, and deep parentheses cut on both sides of his mouth by a million hearty smiles, genuine and false, over the years. Robert got his height from his mother. Evelyn was six feet tall; Robert could remember her for years beating him at basketball under the hoop on the garage. She had a funny little shot from behind her head that her son could not block and which always went in.
    She kept the books at the store, placed orders, changed dead bulbs, and eased Dave through those pained transitions from one failed line to the next sure thing. In years past, Cigar’s had sold bone-­handled cutlery, wood-­burned home address plaques, bicentennial souvenirs, stationery, party gags and favors, costume jewelry, manicure and pedicure instruments, Italian ice cream blown so full of air it seemed in danger of floating to the ceiling, beer steins of the fifty states, wall and desk calendars of every description, macrame wall hangings and flavored cigarette rolling papers, golf supplies, stuffed bears imported from England, and fishing bait and tackle. Each line had moments of early success; Dave and Evelyn’s friends always came in to look and buy