Chapter One
He sat on the worn throw-rug in his room, watching a very determined spider inching its way up a thread of silk dangling from the corner of his ceiling.
Marcus Delaney felt his mind wandering again and he relished the feeling, absently weaving several strands of hemp cord together, forming a tight little braid.
Wonder what Mom's up to, he found himself thinking. His fingers abruptly stilled, and he felt his forehead wrinkle up. As if I didn't know. She's probably lying dazed on the couch, staring at the ceiling...
Helen Delaney had been in a depression ever since her divorce with her husband, James, two years ago. Marc had watched it happen, seen the dull sadness consuming his mother, taking the life of a once-spirited woman and turning her into a sad wretch. It had been no great surprise when he woke up one morning to Helen's half-whispered sob of, “Marky...Marky...I don't want to get out of bed...I-I don't even want to live anymore...”
Marc also remembered his dad well enough, and sometimes he wished he didn't. He wished he were like the younger kids who had watched their parents fall apart, because they were too little to remember, to hold any bitterness against their drunken fathers or stupid mothers.
He looked up from the hemp and glanced at his bed.
On the rare occasions when James would go overboard with his beer, Marc could remember sliding under that bed where he hid as his father called his name and stomped up the stairs. He would storm around Marc's room, then stumble back downstairs, ready to get into it again with his wife. He'd yell a little, cuss a little more, then pass out in the basement and be fine the next morning.
I am never going to drink and turn into a mad drunk like him, Marc promised himself for the hundredth time.
But really, James hadn't been that bad of a guy. He'd been great until his mother and father both died in quick succession. And when he lost a job that he'd held for years on top of it all, that's when he really turned to booze as his way out.
Helen had desperately tried to get James to quit, but he wouldn't or couldn't. The self-admitted disgust of what he was doing soon faded as Helen's pleading grew stronger and it turned instead into anger. The arguing and the fights became frequent and often.
Later, Marc found out that most of the new anger was caused by the guilt James bore from a new affair with a younger woman he used to know at his workplace. When Helen learned of her husband's lover, she immediately filed for the divorce and for custody of Marc. His older sister, Lisa was nineteen at the time, and she promptly gathered her things and moved out without a word.
