Chapter 2
“What’s important is you’re here now.” She patted his arm before edging toward the back of the house. “Let’s let Ronnie know, shall we?”
Jim hesitated, glancing once at the closed door off to the side. “He’s not in his bedroom?” Having his room in the front of the house had made it a hell of a lot easier for Ronnie to sneak out and Jim to sneak in during high school.
Mrs. Mayer stopped in the archway that separated the dining room from the living room. “We moved his things to the basement when he came home. He said the sunlight bothered him.”
His frown lingered as he resumed following her, through the kitchen and to the narrow door that led downstairs. She knocked on it once before opening, but rather than go down, called out, “Ronnie? You have a visitor.” Jim didn’t hear him respond, but she smiled and stepped out of his way. “Go on. He’s going to love seeing you.”
The stairs creaked beneath his weight as he descended. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling at the very bottom, the smell of musty dampness growing stronger the farther he got. It was cooler down here, too, enough for goose bumps to ripple down his arms when he rounded the corner at the bottom. He could count on one hand how many times he’d been down here. The basement had been off-limits, used only for storage, which a young Jim had thought made it perfect for hide-and-seek. Mr. Mayer hadn’t thought so. The day he found them down there playing, he’d sent Jim home and then given Ronnie a tanning to remember. Ronnie tried to wave it off the next day at school, but from the moment Jim saw the bruises on Ronnie’s thin biceps from where Mr. Mayer had grabbed him, Jim had never hated anyone more. They never played in the house when Mr. Mayer was home again. Jim didn’t trust himself not to hit back the next time he saw Mr. Mayer threaten Ronnie.
The boxes had been shoved to the walls, stacked neatly out of the way to make the footprint as spacious as possible. The rag rug he remembered from Ronnie’s treehouse covered the middle of the concrete floor, while one of the camping cots they’d made in Boy Scouts served as the lone piece of furniture. It didn’t even have blankets on it. Instead, an army green sleeping bag was stretched out neatly atop its frame.
A figure sat on the floor beside it, a plate with half a piece of dry toast sitting abandoned next to him. He was hunched forward, the brittle bow of his shoulder blades sprouting like wings from beneath his thin white T-shirt, with a tattered paperback held deftly in his long, thin fingers. One leg was bent, the book propped against his knee, but the other stretched stiffly out in front of him, an ugly metal brace encircling his lower calf and ankle.
Jim tore his focus away from the injury to look more squarely at Ronnie. His black hair was shorn close, which surprised him a little. Ronnie had been discharged months ago. No need for military haircuts anymore. Plus, keeping it short exposed the splatter of puckered scars trailing from his scalp down the right side of his neck. Was that what he wanted? Everybody could see.
Maybe that was the point.
For all the changes, some parts of Ronnie were exactly the same. The long nose. The full mouth. The razor jaw.
His heart twisted. He had waited too long for this visit.
Seconds went by where neither one of them moved. The longer the silence stretched, the more uncomfortable Jim got. He knew about the leg. Most of Clearview did. It made the paper when Ronnie got shipped home. Third page, right underneath an article about the renovations at Cameron’s Hardware almost being complete. Jim cut it out and tucked it into the back of Grandma Mac’s Bible, though he hadn’t looked at it since.
He also knew Ronnie had withdrawn a lot from his family. Jim’s mom had been very clear about that when she relayed Mrs. Mayer’s request to him that he stop by. Mrs. Mayer hoped Jim would be the one to finally draw Ronnie out from his post-discharge blues.
Though he did his best to put on a brave face for his parents, he couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. Depression was what Jim did best these days. In his mind, this visit would play out like the blind leading the blind.
But now that he was here, he realized he had it all wrong. Whatever was going on with Ronnie seemed like more than just the blues.
Unsure what to say, he opted for action. He flopped down into the space against the wall opposite Ronnie, wincing at the jolt that went shooting up from his tailbone. The floor was cold against the back of his legs, and he plucked away a loose thread from the edge of his cut-off shorts.