Summer Sons(27)

“Hey,” Riley said as he planted his ass against his passenger door, one ankle crossed over the other. Andrew dropped his phone between his knees and slanted him a glance. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Andrew replied.

Riley slapped his thighs and scrubbed his hands on his shorts, fidgeting. “I brought up something that it’s real clear you’re not interested in discussing, because I thought it was smart, but it wasn’t.”

Andrew parsed that. “But you’re not sorry about what happened to Eddie, specifically.”

“I don’t know,” Riley said. “I’d like to think I don’t have shit to be sorry for, but who’s to say? I might be worried I do; that’s not your problem to solve for me.”

The car door between them stood as a confessional partition.

“He was getting coke from your cousin. He shouldn’t have been,” Andrew said.

Riley shifted and straightened his legs. “Barely any, to be honest. But yeah, Sam sells people the things they ask for. He isn’t going to be the one to tell you your business.”

Andrew’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the alert box and saw a portion of text—How you like fireworks. “I don’t know if I believe that, man. Eddie knew better.”

“If you’re coming to the party tomorrow you can ask Sam yourself. Hell, you should come anyway. He’ll treat us all good with folks coming back around. I know he’s kind of a shit, but you’ve got to appreciate his dedication to rolling out the welcome mat,” Riley said.

It was like having two separate conversations that happened to cross past one another. Andrew said, “I don’t have to appreciate shit, though.”

“C’mon, Andrew,” Riley huffed.

“What?”

Riley swung his keys around his index finger, gnawing on his bottom lip. He shook his head. “Nothing, don’t bother with my bullshit. Last night was fun, though. Let’s do it again sometime.”

Riley compounded the dismissal by walking around the hood to yank open his door and spill himself into the driver’s seat. He spared one glance across the Challenger as he backed out, arm braced on the passenger’s seat, and was gone. Andrew clambered free of the car, suddenly baking in the late afternoon heat. One beer from the dwindling supply in the fridge accompanied him upstairs. He kicked his sneakers off on the landing and, with a burst of trepidation, opened Eddie’s door. For once there were no papers scattered across the floor.

Andrew sipped from his can on the threshold. Dust motes swirled in the gusts from the struggling vent. The lingering scent of that small universe wrapped him in its welcome funk. At the left corner of the pine desktop, Eddie’s fat gaming laptop sat unassuming. Andrew dropped into the chair, which creaked under his weight, and slid the beastly thing in front of him. His grip left streaks through the accumulated silt on the sleek pitch-black casing. Guilty, he wiped it with his forearm until it was more presentable. Another crisp, wheaty mouthful of beer set his heart steady.

Face recognition rejected him, of course. He tapped through to the password screen and entered Eddie’s usual combination of their birthdays and the word boobs. He’d used the same one for his main devices since middle school, and Andrew had a similar baseline, in case either of them needed to access the other’s systems.

Except the password failed. Andrew frowned, altered the birthday order, and entered it again. Another failure; he tried Eddie’s variant, rearranged the words and numbers, tried over and over until the system warned him it was about to lock him out for good. He smacked the lid closed with more force than he should’ve and got up to pace, stung.

Eddie was shit at remembering passwords. Where would he have recorded a new one, after breaking their ten-year streak? Andrew turned in place, one slow rotation. The clean desktop, the cluttered bedside table, the closed drawer containing too much of Eddie’s callousness—he took them in once, then again, a thought rising like a slow bubble from a black depth of sea: where is his phone? It hadn’t been among his effects when the hospital turned him over for the funeral: one of his lesser-worn gold rings and the thin platinum chain he wore too often, his wallet, the scuffed red Converse he’d been buried in.

Suspicion intensified, tripping up his spine.

He sat his beer on the desk and glanced over the bookshelves, then knelt to run his hand under the bed and the table beside it. He found a fistful of cobwebs and a quarter. His sinuses burned ominously while he pawed through the closet and the full laundry basket, doing his best to disturb nothing, with no result. Crossing the hall to his own room, he did a cursory inspection between the mounded pillows and inside the barren drawers of the handsome desk he ached to sit at with Eddie perched on the corner. Thin sweat prickled along his brow. He bypassed Riley’s shut door and swept his hands over every surface in the living room and foyer, moving his own unsorted possessions as if there might be something hiding underneath. The phone remained elusive.

Andrew jogged outside to unlock the Challenger and crawl into the back seat, sticking his hands under floor mats, into seat pockets. He used his phone’s flashlight to reveal a loose cigarette and a few crumpled receipts. On the one hand, he was surprised at how fucking clean the car was. On the other, a painful, frightened excitement stoked his nerves high. He fired a message off to his roommate:

have you seen Eddie’s phone