Eight days later, I found a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on my bed. It was folded back to a short article in the Metro section, about a drug bust. I dropped my backpack to the floor and sat cross-legged on my bed to read the article. Two men in a van with Florida license plates had been stopped in College Park on an anonymous tip. In the van, under a false floor, police found a kilo of cocaine. The two were being charged with drug possession and trafficking. A third person was being sought for questioning, according to police sources.
Small photos of the two arrested men accompanied the article. One of them, Jay Gardner, with a buzz cut and a block-shaped head, was unfamiliar. The other one had a goatee and acne scars, the same ones he’d had when he fought with my father in our house, before Ponytail came through the front door with a gun. His name was listed as Samuel Bridges. I looked at his face as he stared insolently at the camera. The article said the charges could bring sentences of five to thirty years in prison. Longer than what Frankie has, I thought, and then felt disgusted that my measure for judging jail time was Frankie. Beyond that, though, I didn’t know what I felt, or how I should feel. I had a good idea that the same person who had called in the anonymous tip had also left the newspaper on my bed, and was probably at Ronan’s right now, talking with Ruben about unreliable vendors or the price of liquor. Should I feel thankful? Pleased that justice had been done? Upset that Ponytail had apparently not been nabbed and was still out there? Angry with and perhaps frightened of my uncle?
Something else bothered me about the newspaper. It felt like an apology, as if my uncle was trying to make amends for failing to keep Frankie out of prison. If that’s what it was, I understood the gesture, but it also upset me, my uncle delivering these men, so to speak, to atone for what had happened to Frankie.
In retrospect, it was at that moment, I think, that I realized I had to leave. Not just leave for college, but leave my uncle’s house, leave him and his dangerous, shadowy life. I wouldn’t be going far away, though. My teachers and a school counselor had told me about college opportunities out of state, with scholarships and financial aid. My AP art teacher, Mrs. Jacobs, had gone to Laguna College of Art and Design in California and knew some of the faculty, and she had offered to write a recommendation for me. “You have an intelligence and a sensitivity that is a gift, Ethan,” she had said to me. “Please don’t be that boy who wastes such a gift.” But as much as I wanted to escape, I couldn’t just move to the other side of the country. Later I would weigh that loyalty against a growing sense of regret. But going to California would have meant leaving Susannah as well, and I couldn’t do that, not then, not when my sister was trying to put the broken, jagged pieces of herself back together. I would be going to Georgia State instead, right in the heart of downtown Atlanta. But I would not be living with my uncle anymore. I could not unlearn what I now knew about Uncle Gavin and the world he worked in. It frightened me, and especially as Uncle Gavin had been unable to keep Frankie out of jail, I told myself I wanted nothing to do with it. But even worse, a small part of me was drawn to that world, fascinated by it, its rejection of simple morals and right versus wrong.
And so, out of mingled fear and revulsion, I would leave it behind me.
At that moment, though, I did not think all of this out so clearly. Instead, I just sat on my bed, the newspaper in my hand, looking out my window, for a long time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The hall to the kitchen in my uncle’s bar has not changed. There are the same bathroom doors, the same private rooms, the swinging door that leads to the kitchen and the stairwell up to my uncle’s sanctum sanctorum, the same smell of grease and cleaner and chicken tenders and the loamy undercurrent of Guinness, as if there is a secret river of it flowing beneath the floor. And when I step into the kitchen, I stop so quickly that my shoes squeak on the tile floor, because there is Ruben standing in the middle of the kitchen, in dark slacks and a red dress shirt, although he has misplaced his fedora. But Ruben is dead—he had a heart attack three years ago, right after Frankie’s mother died. And then my heart leaps and dies in the back of my throat, because it isn’t Ruben but Frankie.
“Holy shit,” I say.
Frankie raises his chin at me in a short jerk of recognition. “You too,” he says. He puts his hands in his pockets, a studied attempt at ease that doesn’t match the set of his jaw or the firm line of his eyebrows.
“I … good to see you,” I manage.
“You were going to say, ‘I didn’t know you were out of prison,’ ” Frankie says.
“Ethan,” my uncle says behind me, and I turn to see Uncle Gavin, in his flat tweed cap, walk into the kitchen. He stops outside of hugging distance.
“Hey,” I say. I’m still processing the fact that Frankie is here and feel awash in guilt. I’m caught between my uncle and Frankie, like a bit of metal being repelled by two equally powerful magnets. I make my choice and turn to Frankie. “When did you get out?”
“Few months ago,” Frankie
