Tweaked by Katherine Holubitsky

sounded.
    When Chase saw Dad’s car, he took off out the back door. Dad brought Grandma home to stay with us that night. The whole thing of Chase showing up, drugged out and demanding money, scared her so much she put her house up for sale within a week. Not just because of Chase, she insisted, but because of rising crime in the city in general.
    We didn’t see Chase again for two weeks. Dad had already emptied his room and moved all his stuff to the garage when he showed up like nothing had happened. He wandered into the front hall on a Sunday morning.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” Dad demanded.
    â€œI’m hungry,” he said. “I need a place to sleep.”
    â€œWell, you’re not doing it here. You can collect your things, they’re in the garage. You’re not coming back here, Chase.”
    It was a really tough thing for Dad to do. Mom had gone into her bedroom, where she was crying. Through all their arguing, they’d agreed it was the only way he might come around. Maybe they were just encouraging his habit by giving him a place to stay. Maybe if they let him really hit bottom it would make him realize what he’d become and he’d ask for help.
    Dad allowed Mom to make Chase a sandwich; then he watched him put a few things in a backpack before he left. It was a harsh moment. For Mom and Dad, I knew it was probably beyond their imagination that after years of school and family holidays, Christmases, soccer games and birthdays, this was the way one of their children would leave home.
    A few days later, Chase entered the house when no one was home and stole Dad’s camera. My parents became paranoid about going anywhere, in case Chase broke in again. He continued to show up a couple of times a week wanting money. For groceries, he told Mom. He was so withered and gaunt she couldn’t help herself. Chase would leave with sixty or seventy dollars, and always, the empty promise that he would clean up. Because Chase often showed up in the middle of the night, Mom began leaving money under the doormat so he wouldn’t wake up Dad.
    Chase had become a huge financial drain. I asked Mom why she kept giving him money. She knew where it was going.
    â€œHe’s my son, Gordie. I don’t know what else to do. I hope at least some of it goes to feed him.”
    Three times she gave him the first month’s rent on a bachelor apartment. Three times it went up his nose. One morning we got a call from the hospital. Chase had blacked out in a parking lot, fallen down and hithis head. Someone had called the police, and he was now in the psychiatric ward at the hospital. But by the time Mom and Dad got there he had walked.
    He showed up at the nursing home where Mom worked, scaring the pants off the old folks. He embarrassed Dad by wandering into a class he was teaching. He stood at the back of the room, his bug eyes staring blankly, his spastic movements distracting everyone until Dad excused himself. He took him out in the hall, gave him fifty dollars and told him never to show up at his work again. It didn’t stop him, because all that ever mattered to Chase was that he got his next fix.
    Less than a month before Chase knocked Richard Cross on the head, I came home from school to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table puzzling over the statement from a credit card she’d never owned. The bill was for five thousand dollars—the card was maxed out. The invoice included motel rooms, taxi rides, some groceries, but mostly cash withdrawals—a couple of hundred dollars at a time. Chase had applied for the card in Mom’s name, using documents and bank receipts he had found around the house.
    Mom and Dad were stunned at the amount of money they owed and the depth of Chase’s betrayal. Most amazing to me was that Chase still possessed the mental faculties to sneak into the house and put something like that together. After that, Dad had the locks changed.A few