Monsters Got Blamed for Murder, So I Relived the Victim's Last Hour novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: The Shaking

My hands did not stop shaking until a quarter to ten that night, and by then I was sitting in my mother's kitchen.

Reiss had driven me home from Honore Street without a word.

He had walked me up the front steps because I had asked him to.

My mother opened the downstairs door in her housecoat, looked at my face, and then at his.

"You are the one with the thermos," she said. "Come in. You are a boy who sleeps in his car, I can see it."

"Mrs. Mroz, I'm thirty-seven," Reiss said.

"That is a boy."

She put two bowls of stuffed cabbage in the microwave, and her swollen knuckles took the plates down off the shelf one at a time.

I ate standing up, and my mother pointed at a chair until I sat.

Her pill bottle sat by the sugar bowl with the orange cap, and I did not let myself look at it.

"I will be in the bedroom with the door open," she said. "I am not listening. Halinka, eat everything."

I waited until her door was ajar and the television had come on low.

"I put my hand on a fold today," I said to Reiss. "Not a dead man who was killed by one. The fold."

"I know. I was outside the cooler."

"He was a school bus driver from Bourbonnais, forty-seven, and he drove Route 14 in his head the whole way through the dark."

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