But when Roy downed enough vodka and energy drink, he could admit that John, after a fashion, owed him, too. It wasn’t a safe case to make, especially when asking for money. No matter, though. It was true. John owed Roy just as much as the other way around.

Roy was tired all the way through. Things were hard. Life. Work. Hanging on. He hated asking John for anything. But he wasn’t getting any better at being hungry, cold, and sliding into the lonely groove that led him to watch the oncoming traffic from the sidewalk and wonder if it would hurt much to step off.

So Roy would have to withstand John’s eyes glittering in hateful hope for Roy to get lost or get dead. It didn’t matter to John how things went for Roy. Or maybe, more likely, it mattered to him a lot, just not in a way Roy wanted to think about. He’d seen the sparks of temper in John.

Sparks, fuses. Old-dynamite wrong.

But this last night, with a little bit of patience and a fierce grip on his nerves, Roy had found the sweet spot between being needy and being invisible. Roy had taken care of the night, then the night had taken care of itself. Things were looking up.

Mikey and Byron had asked the four guys standing around to come back to Mikey’s place to play video games and drink more beer. Three guys declined, and Roy, the only one arguably too old to go with two twentysomethings to play video games, was included only by accident of his standing there within earshot. He’d said yes before they could bend the conversation away from him, and finished the dregs of the warm pint he’d been trying to make last for better than two hours.

But a single flipped light switch and two steps into Mikey’s nasty little hole of a house and the plan was undone. The pride of the house (there was no reason to think any of the other rooms held more promise) was a seventy-five-inch TV. It had probably been top-of-the-discount-store-line right up until someone had put a roundish cave-in into the screen with shatter cracks flung to every corner of the glass.

Mikey threw a fit and cussed the walls over who might have done such a thing, while Byron scratched at his scalp and tried not to laugh, which didn’t go over well. Roy watched between them both, counting in his head to keep the anxiety pushed down, listening hard to figure out whom to side with to keep the night from going over to fists and ending too soon.

Then he remembered the board game in the truck and convinced the boys to go old-school with the entertainment.