Page 56 of Darling Beasts

Talia shut the door and whirled back around.

“Man. It’s a trip being here now,” Ozzie said as he cast his gaze about the place. “We spentsomuch time here as kids.”

“Not me,” Talia said. She went behind the bar and squatted to check the inventory. “I only came for the gym.”

Ozzie and I raised eyebrows at each other, as in,of course.

Talia reappeared with a bottle of vodka and removed a tumbler from the shelf. “Though Mom did hold a birthday party here for me once, but it was just her friends’ kids.”

“Wow, Mom throwing a birthday party,” I said. “What must it have been like?”

“I was seventeen, by the way,” Talia said, and I snort-laughed.

Vodka in hand, Talia wandered over and flicked on one ofthe arcade games. I heard the telltale start-up music, followed bychomp chomp chomp chomp. As Talia maneuvered Ms. Pac-Man through her maze, I craned forward, zeroing in on the dozens of little holes dotting the machine.

“Oh my God!” I said, pointing as a memory clicked into place. Ozzie was nine and absolutely fixated on the idea of a BB gun.

“If you can figure out a way to get one,” Mom had said, “go for it. But don’t involve me.”

Cut to us biking eight miles to the fairgrounds, where a gun show was being held, and from which Ozzie purchased a Daisy Red Ryder. We biked home triumphant, narrowly avoiding three separate accidents along the way, but our giddiness was short-lived. A BB gun sounded cool—our friends in New York didn’t have anything like that—but Ozzie wasn’t looking to kill innocent animals, so what were we supposed to do with it? Shoot up the recreation pavilion, it turned out.

“The infamous BB gun,” Ozzie said now. “I’ll never forget Dad screaming at me on the phone.Why? Whyyyyyy? What was going through your head?”

“He loved when you answered, ‘I dunno, seemed fun?’”

My brother laughed, and it was the first time I’d seen the real Ozzie since he arrived. This was the kid I knew. Cool. Funny. Mind operating on a different, better plane. These past two weeks he didn’t seem uptight per se, but definitely like he was holding something back.

“We had some good times here,” he said. “It’s sad it ended so abruptly.”

“Yes,that’swhat’s sad,” Talia said to the sound of Ms. Pac-Man dying. Literally giving up the ghost. “The loss of the opportunity to shoot BBs at arcade games.”

“Yeah, cuz it was the fucking bomb.”

“You two.” Talia took a swig of vodka straight from the bottle. “The way you act about Mom, it’s not...” She fished aroundfor the word. “You’re mad she left, and I get it. But the leaving doesn’t define her. We used to have fun together, all of us.”

“Okay...” I said. Mostly I recalled nannies and babysitters, but wasn’t about to pipe up and risk my life.

“Believe it or not, we had fun back in New York,” Talia said, sensing my skepticism. “We were a normal family, doing normal family stuff. Like how practically every other day Gabby made us trek over to Hippo Playground in Riverside Park.”

“I totally remember that!” Ozzie said, and funny enough, I remembered it, too. Hippos were for sure one animal I was glad to have never manifested and KNOCK ON WOOD.

“There was a real relationship,” Talia said, “and it’s not right how you pretend nothing changed after she was gone.”

“But nothing did change,” I said.

“Our mom died!”

“I’m talking about logistically, one day to the next. Think about it, Tal. I kept getting up and going to school, and practicing for whatever sport was in season. Diane came every afternoon, and each night I studied in the kitchen where she cooked the same meals. Always chicken cacciatore on Tuesdays.”

“Thirty Ways to Cook a Chicken: the Diane Randolph Story,” Ozzie joked.

“Stop pretending Diane could be a replacement for Mom.”

“You’re not listening,” Ozzie said. “What Bags is saying is that Mom’s death was tragic, on an intellectual level, but she left us long before she died.”

“She didn’t leave you. She went to California.Temporarily. Because she was ill.”

“Was she, though? Was she ill the whole time?” Ozzie said.

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