Page 157 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

His Brother’s Keeper

“What’s going to happen to Stu when your mom dies?”
Harry pressed on.

“It’s none of your fucking business!” Ed yelled at him. “It’s
no one’s business but mine,” he insisted. Harry thought he was
about to hang up on him, but instead Ed just started weeping.

“I want to help,” Harry said.

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” he said, and this time he did
hang up.

* * *

Harry didn’t wait for an invitation to drive out to Ed’s place.
He reached his apartment in under four hours. Edgarton —
they had a good laugh about that — was a small college town.
Nothing special. Just a job in the university’s public relations
department. An “interim position, that’s all,” Ed had called
it when he took the job, “a different environment”. But Ed
loved the city: the walking, the bars, the easy pickups. There
were lots better jobs to be had in the city. This wasn’t about a
change in the environment, this was about getting away from
the environment, getting away from Stu, as if distance would
make the problem disappear.

Ed’s apartment was located on the second floor of an old
Victorian-style house on a quiet street of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century homes. The house had a private entrance to
the upper floor in the back; alternatively, you could reach the
upper floor through the front entrance, up the center stairs
from the main hallway. But Harry decided to go around the
back, preferring the anonymity.

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