Don't Let Go by Jaci Burton Page B

stew,” his mother said. “You’ll stay for dinner, right?”
    â€œSure.” Somehow he got the idea this had all been planned. Something wrong with the car. Dinner already on the stove. But whatever. He was here. He could put up with dinner.
    â€œHarold, go play with the dog,” his mother said. “She’s just so sweet.”
    There’d been no dogs since their dog Benjie had died eight years ago. He wasn’t sure why his mom and dad hadn’t gotten another dog.
    Maybe it was because they’d been too busy focusing all their time and attention on Kurt.
    While his mom worked on dinner and his dad played with Roxie, Brady took his glass of iced tea and wandered into the living room. He went over to the mantel above thefireplace, where the family photos still stood untouched, as if no time had passed. There had been no new memories made since Kurt’s funeral. No marriages, no grandkids, nothing new to replace the ones that stood there now.
    There were photos of him and Kurt as kids, the typical sports shots from baseball and soccer. The grade school and high school photos had been framed as a collage, but the ones of Kurt were lined up on the piano like a goddamn shrine. He wandered down the hall and into the bedrooms. Mom had finally turned his room into a sewing and craft room. Kurt’s room, though, still had his old bedspread and twin bed, and all of Kurt’s trophies and ribbons and posters were preserved as if they expected him to walk through the door at any moment and hop into that twin bed.
    Hell, Kurt had long ago stopped coming by the house, hadn’t stayed in that room for years before he’d died, and his parents had still held out hope that they could somehow reach him, could somehow entice him to come back home, as if they could rehabilitate him on the strength of their memories of their sweet young son alone.
    Yeah, that hadn’t worked. And keeping this nauseating shrine wasn’t helping them move on, either.
    Not that he had much room to talk, since he wasn’t exactly the world leader of the moving-on movement.
    He went over to the small desk, remembering coming into Kurt’s room to ask him for help with a math problem.
    His damn brother had been a math genius. He could have done anything with his life. Kurt had decided against college, had gotten a job as an auto mechanic in Tulsa. It had been a good job, too. Until he’d lost it because he’d missed so much work due to his drug use. Then he’d wandered in and out of jobs. Hell, he’d mostly wandered, disappearing for days, sometimes weeks, only to resurface to hit up their mom and dad for cash.
    At first they’d given him money, and he’d stay at the house for a while. Until he’d abruptly disappear again. Brady had told them to stop giving him money, that he wasusing it for drugs. He’d argued multiple times with his parents about that.
    He stared at the blue ribbon Brady had won for track his senior year of high school. He remembered cheering on his brother at the finish line.
    He sighed. That was so long ago.
    He flipped on the desk light in Kurt’s room, remembering the night they’d found him passed out on the floor in here.
    Mom had hollered and they’d all come running. She said they had to help him, that they had to rally around him and let him know they were there for him. Anything to keep him home, that he couldn’t live on the streets.
    Christ. What a clusterfuck that had been.
    They’d gotten him into rehab once. He’d cleaned up after that for a few months, even gotten a job. He’d talked about going to school, getting a degree.
    It had all been useless. He could have been anything.
    Instead . . .
    With a disgusted sigh, he turned off the light and left Kurt’s room, running into Roxie. He grabbed her stuffed chicken out of her mouth and tossed it for her. She dashed down the hall after it.
    He smiled,