“Pillow,” Nimble said, lifting Morgan’s head to adjust the pillow beneath it.
“Blanket.” The blanket lofted softly above him and then landed like warm feathers.
“Now sleep. I’ll check the place, make sure everything’s okay.”
“But what about you?” Morgan’s voice felt thick in his throat as he reached for Nimble’s hand, missed, then grabbed his wrist and clung to it like a lifeline. “You’re younger’n me. If I’m drunk, you’re drunk.”
“I’m fine.” Nimble laughed as the room went dark. “I’m not the one on pain meds.”
When Nimble came back to check on him some amorphous time later, Morgan again fumbled for his hand. Nimble didn’t make Morgan let go, for which Morgan was unbelievably grateful.
The last time he’d reached for Bradley, for a hug, Bradley had shoved Morgan from him. Morgan was a pathetic fool to have made that gesture, and now he was making it again. Seeking human contact, the closest human to him.
Nimble. A dark outline in the light from the hallway. His hair hiding his expression, except for those eyes, which, like jewels, seemed to be pulling Morgan inward and inward.
“Rest now,” Nimble said. He leaned close, but only to tweak the blanket so it was beneath Morgan’s chin. “You’re going to have shit for a head in the morning.”
“Yes.” Morgan closed his eyes. He would have shit for a head, and he would deserve it. He would also need to look Nimble in the eye and realize they knew a little of each other’s truths,now, and there was no going back from that. “Thank you,” he whispered.
“You bet.”
You bet. Like it was nothing. Like it was no trouble. Like it was okay, because they were friends.
How strange to find companionship from a hobo.
CHAPTER 14
jack
When Jack had left home and jumped on that first freight train, it had been the beginning of summer, a year after he’d graduated from high school.
He’d worked in his dad’s store for years, an old-time smoke-and-candy shop on Rising Sun Avenue. It was like any other shop of that sort, a narrow, grimly lit place with only two aisles, a gasping freezer in the back that looked like it had once stored dead body parts, and a continual smell of burnt ash. It was hanging on by ragged fingernails, relying mostly on neighborhood foot traffic.
The shop was a seven-minute walk from his family’s home on Lawndale Avenue, five minutes if he hurried down Gilham Street, which he often did. It was a half-hour walk from Northeast High School, so while Jack had been in school, if he was running late for his shift at the store, he’d take the number 70 bus up Cottman Avenue and then run the rest of the way down Rising Sun.
His mom worked in the back, doing a bit of accounting for the shops along that street: the Asian fusion restaurant, the catering shop, the street ministry, the childcare place. She wasconstantly smoking Virginia Slims and talking on her iPhone to her friends.
She brought in enough money that Jack’s dad didn’t care how much she talked. Just that the books were straight and nobody came complaining. Jack’s brothers, Danny and Evan, worked in the shop, too, when they weren’t hanging out with their friends around the high school, looking to score with the girls there, even though they were years too old.
Jack never cared for high school girls—not while he was in school with them, and not after he graduated. Not even the really cute, smart ones who were on the fast track for Bryn Mawr, or so they said.
Nobody had to tell him that those girls were too good for him, even though they were nice to him and laughed at his jokes when they came into the shop for candy and gum. Why they would take the bus or get a ride all the way from the high school to the shop, he could never fathom.
He knew not to tell his dad the truth about those girls: He’d seen two of them kissing at the bus stop, under the trees.
His dad would have thrown them out of the shop and then set the neighborhood buzzing with the news that they were a pair of lesbos. That’s what he called girls like them, lesbos. Jack had to look it up, using the online dictionary in the library.
Lesbos was an island filled with old Greek women reciting poetry and falling in love with each other. It was the opposite, he figured, of being gay, another term his dad liked to fling about.
Jack had known what that meant years before, when a pair of young men had been lingering outside the shop. They’d probably been waiting to go into the Asian fusion place next door and had been holding hands and kissing. Quick pecks, mouth to mouth, little smiles on their faces and in their eyes.
Jack’s dad, seeing this, had roared and stomped outside to give them a piece of his mind. Shoving had started. The policewere called, and with three cop cars lining Rising Sun Avenue, all the shop owners had come out to stare and trade gossip and take pictures.
His dad had been angry to begin with, that was true. But he was steaming when the two gay guys weren’t arrested and he, Ben Foxley, got written up for verbal abuse.
Jack, in all innocence, had asked, “What do you care that they were on the street? A lot of people hang out waiting for the bus. Maybe they would have come in and bought something.”
Surely that was the most important thing, right? Building a good relationship with potential customers? At least Jack had thought so.
