Read Fragile Beasts for Free Online

so wrong?
    Standing there watching the grief parade troop past me, being clasped and grabbed and cried on and offered worthless words of advice and commiseration, I kept glancing at Mom smoking and pretending that she didn’t care that everyone was ignoring her, and all I could think of were those questions and why I couldn’t ask her any of them, especially the last one.
    I look over again and she’s gone. I don’t know where she went. She probably got sick of the dirty looks and wandered off. I don’t care too much because here comes Shelby Jack.
    She’s wearing a black dress and high heels and big black sunglasses and has her hair slicked back in a ponytail with a black bow.
    I imagine rich people have the perfect outfit for every occasion. She probably has a charity luncheon outfit and one for watching tennis tournaments, so it would only make sense she’d have a funeral dress. I think she goes to a lot of old rich guy funerals. I know their family went to Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Ten million other people did too, but they were actually invited.
    I wasn’t sure she’d come. She’s missing school to be here.
    She starts up the steps, sees me, and comes toward me, slipping off her sunglasses.
    She’s been crying again.
    “Kyle,” she says, then puts her arms around me and gives me a hug.
    I let my hands lightly touch her back and her hair while she presses against my chest.
    God, I’d give anything to be able to do this without someone having to die first.
    “How are you doing?” she asks as she pulls away from me.
    “I’m okay.”
    She takes my hand and squeezes it.
    “I guess that’s a really stupid question to ask someone at their father’s funeral.”
    “It’s okay. I know what you mean.”
    “Where’s Klint?”
    Klint. Of course, Klint.
    “He’s off somewhere with Tyler. He’ll be back in time.”
    She keeps holding my hand.
    “I saw your mom,” she says with a frown.
    Shelby knows all about Mom leaving us. She hates my mother, pure and simple. She won’t accept any excuse for a woman leaving her children.
    It hits me for the first time that the way I feel about Dad dying is pretty much the same way I felt about Mom leaving. Except I cried when Mom left. I cried every day for a month.
    “Did you talk to her?” Shelby asks me.
    “A little.”
    “And?”
    “We didn’t have much to talk about.”
    “What about Klint?”
    “He left with Tyler as soon as he saw her.”
    She nods her understanding. I know she thinks Klint is acting the way he should, and I’m not.
    “How did you feel? Seeing her again?”
    “Good,” I tell her.
    I’m not lying, exactly. It’s one of those things I can’t explain to someone else.
    I thought I’d be happy to see her again and I am, but it’s a sick kind of happy, like what a wounded soldier must feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s going to live but without his legs.
    “Why is she here exactly?”
    “I don’t know,” I answer her honestly.
    I know what she’s trying to ask. My heart beats faster thinking back to the night when Aunt Jen said Mom would make us move to Arizona with her.
    I glance at Shelby’s pretty face, then at the hills behind her. The green of summer has begun to fade and soon the bright colors of fall will appear in patches of orange, red, and yellow. The air smells like damp earth and dry leaves. It’s warm and cool at the same time, like a breath.
    What do I know about Arizona? It’s hot. It’s a desert. I imagine the air burning as I swallow it and cooking me from the inside out. Barren, treeless, huge white sun blazing down on tiny white houses, dry red dirt instead of moist black soil, horizons that stretch on forever instead of comforting, worn-down old mountains surrounding us on all sides.
    “Are you going to have to move?” she whispers.
    “I hope not.”
    “What does Klint say?”
    I sigh, irritably.
    “Klint’s not saying anything. He’s spent the past two days hanging out with Dad’s truck at