Mercy (The Night Man Chronicles Book 3), Brett Battles [best books to read in your 20s TXT] 📗

if realizing he shouldn’t have, he quickly looks away again. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Jar says. “I sometimes feel like screaming, too. Go on.”

“I, um, I went downstairs to see if I could help. Sawyer listens to me. I’m not sure why but he always has.”

“Because you’re his big brother.”

A shrug. “I guess.” He pauses. “Dad had a few drinks before he came home last night, and more after.”

“Does he drink often?” I ask. We haven’t seen Chuckie take a drink since the family returned to Mercy, but I am again reminded about that unpunished DUI.

“Once every week or two, maybe. Not every night. And not always a lot…though the amount doesn’t really matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“He gets mean whether it’s one beer or ten.”

“Don’t you mean meaner?”

He glances up. “Yeah, I guess.”

“When he does not drink, does he get physical?” Jar asks.

“A little maybe, but not really. And not as rough, for sure.”

“So, he had a few drinks last night, both before and after he came home,” I say. Evan nods. “And then something happened that upset Sawyer, and that’s what triggered your father?”

“He’d told Sawyer to go to bed, but Sawyer always goes to bed at eighty thirty and it wasn’t eighty thirty yet. He likes things to…”

“Follow a routine?” Jar suggests.

“Yeah, exactly. If his schedule needs to change, we have to prepare him ahead of time so that he’s expecting it.”

“And your dad didn’t do that?”

Evan shakes his head. “I don’t know why he told him to go to bed early. He knows what happens when things are suddenly changed on Sawyer.”

I bet I can guess why. A power play.

Chuckie was a little—or a lot—drunk so his inhibitors were off. (Celebration of another farmhouse burning, perhaps?) He probably saw Sawyer sitting in front of the TV and became annoyed that his son operates by his own set of rules instead of Chuckie’s.

Or maybe the boy just looked at him wrong.

“When I got downstairs, it looked like he was going to grab Sawyer and carry him up to his bedroom,” Evan says. “That would have been even worse than changing Sawyer’s schedule. He’d be messed up for weeks. And…and I wasn’t quite sure what my dad might do when he got to Sawyer’s room.”

An undercurrent of experience carries his last words. I don’t sense he means sexual abuse but physical for sure.

“What did you do?” Jar asks.

“The only thing I could. I got in between them.”

“What about your mother? Where was she?”

“She’d been upstairs, too. If she’d been with Sawyer, none of that would have happened.”

“You know it’s not her fault, either, right?” I say.

“I know,” he says, but I can tell he does lay at least a small percent of blame at her feet. I have a feeling she’s been doing the best she can, that probably without her interventions over the years, the situation would have gotten a lot worse a lot sooner.

I give him a nod to continue.

“Me getting in the way only made my dad more upset. He grabbed me and threw me out of the way. That’s when I hit the bookcase. He turned back to Sawyer, but before he could grab him, too, Mom ran in and told him no. She said some other things—I can’t remember what. It’s all kind of…mixed up, you know? She did calm him down, though. She told me to take Sawyer upstairs. I thought my father might try something, but all he did was glare at us as we walked out.

“I took Sawyer to my room and told him to lie on my bed. I do that sometimes when he has a bad day so he’s used to it. I didn’t want him to be in his room alone, in case our dad wasn’t done with him.”

“What happened next?” I ask.

“I listened to them yelling downstairs. Well, my dad yelling and my mom trying to smooth over everything.”

“What was he yelling?”

“Things like how hard his life is. How none of us understand the pressure he’s under. How we are all ungrateful, and we would all see real soon how stupid we’ve been to not give him the respect he deserves. He said some things about Sawyer and me, too, about how disappointed he is in us. How we’re not turning out the way he wanted us to be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

“I’m sorry for all those times, too.”

He doesn’t say anything to this, but for a moment he looks thankful.

“Did either of them come and check on you?”

“Mom did. Sawyer had already fallen asleep. He’s good at that kind of thing. She said everything’s going to be fine, but that we should stay out of our dad’s way as much as we can for the next few days.”

“Did you show her your bruises?” Jar asks.

“I didn’t see the point. She was already trying to put it all behind us. It’s the way she always does it.”

“Because it’s the only way she knows how to survive and how to help you two survive, too.”

He grimaces at Jar. “It’s not the only way.”

“What I am saying is we all must find ways to keep going, and this is hers. Remember she has been caught in this a lot longer than you.”

Barely able to contain his anger, he says, “Then why didn’t she leave a long time ago, when she realized he was an asshole?”

“From what I’ve learned about people, it is because it is not that easy.” Jar sounds like an alien anthropologist, specializing in the humans of Earth. Which she kind of is. “I don’t know what happened with your mother, but I do know people are often blind to certain traits in the ones they love, especially early in a relationship. By the time they truly see their partner for who they are, they’ve become trapped, or at least feel they are. At first by the inability to know what to do, or to even act at all. Later, by other aspects. Like children.”

“Are you