Read The Cut (Spero Lucas) for Free Online

on the Chicago Ave courts, over by Montgomery College. And there were those people he didn’t see but were spoken of, young men and women who had gone off to college, become professionals of some sort, and never returned; others who were in lockup in places like Clarksburg or, if they had done their dirt in D.C., prisons in North Carolina or Illinois.
    The moving pictures flickered through his mind constantly when he walked and rode these streets. He saw his brother Leo in his red vest, working his first job with the Gross boys up at the hardware store; and his brother Dimitrius, on his skateboard by the library park, strung out on speed and scary thin; and his sister, Irene, sullen, wearing black, catching smokes with her black-clad friends; and his mom, always gregarious, stopping to talk to neighbors as she walked her dogs. Mostly he saw his father, Evangelos “Van” Lucas, everywhere he looked. In the Safeway, exchanging Christmas cards with the grocery store employee and elder martial artist Mr. Vong; gassing up his Chevy truck outside the Texaco; on Selim, bullshitting with the auto body guys; in the breezeway where the Fred Folsom bust of Norman Lane, “the Mayor,” a fondly remembered, now-deceased homeless man, was on display; in the alley behind Bell Flowers where his father had often walked; at the homeless shelter where he had dropped off his old clothing; and on the ball fields where he had watched Spero and Leo compete.
    Lucas had been away. Now staying close to home was a comfort.
    HIS MOTHER still lived in the house in which he’d been raised, a yellow bungalow with a deep backyard, set on the crest of a hill. Lucas’s father, who knew many contractors, had blown out the back of the house and raised its roof as their family eventually grew to six. The home’s renovation had rendered it architecturally incorrect, but it suited their needs.
    Lucas parked and walked toward the house, noting that Leo’s car, a Hyundai something-or-other, was on the street. Two dogs, Cheyenne and Yuma, began to bark exuberantly behind the screen door as Lucas approached. Both were mixed breed, short haired, and on the large side, with tan-yellow coats. Cheyenne had a Lab’s head on a boxer’s body; Yuma was mostly Lab. Eleni Lucas had adopted them at the Humane Society on Georgia at Geranium, against Van’s fake protests. Shilo, now gone, a yellow Lab-pit mix, had been their first. Eleni was the type to bring in anyone, human or animal, who needed a home. Despite his mostly feigned gruff exterior, Van Lucas had been that kind of person, too.
    “Out the way, dogs,” said Lucas as he entered the house, nudging Yuma, the younger and more boisterous of the two, aside with his knee. He patted them and rubbed behind their ears as they flanked him, their tails wagging and windmilling as they walked into the small living room. On the mantel above a brick fireplace sat photographs of their large and scattered family: Irene, now an attorney in San Francisco, the Lucases’ oldest, their sole biological child, distant geographically and emotionally; Dimitrius, a longtime drug addict and thief, in and out of lockup, who only called hismother when he needed cash, currently in the wind, location unknown; and Leo and Spero, the two siblings who had stayed nearby. Their photos ranged from toddler to adult: Leo in a basketball uniform, Spero in wrestling singlet, Leo with his students, Spero in his dress blues. Scattered among photos of their children were those of Van and Eleni: shaggy haired and pink-eyed in the seventies; Van leaning on the bed of his Silverado at a job site; the two of them walking arm-in-arm out the doors of St. Sophia after their wedding ceremony, smiling, ducking rice; and the various group family portraits, the frames of the photographs progressively crowded as new babies and dogs arrived, the parents looking increasingly older, tired but happy, an odd-looking bunch to outsiders but perfectly normal to