Chapter 13 - THE COLLAPSE OF THE TOWER
The arrest was neither dramatic nor cinematic. It was pathetic.
Eleanor didn't fight physically; she simply went limp, wailing incoherently about how ungrateful children were the curse of the earth as two officers guided her into the back of a squad car. The neighbors on Elm Street—the same neighbors who had smiled politely during Sunday barbecues and gossiped over fence lines—were standing on their porches in bathrobes, filming the entire spectacle on their smartphones.
The digital tables had turned permanently. There was no framing this as elder abuse. The flashing lights, the shattered door, the armed thugs in police custody, and the formal arrest of the neighborhood matriarch on fraud charges were all captured in high definition from twelve different angles.
When the cruiser pulled away, the red tail-lights disappearing down the tree-lined street, Mike remained on the curb. He hadn't been arrested; the thugs hadn't targeted him with legal documents, and the audit showed he was merely an accomplice to petty rental theft, not the principal author of the bank fraud.
He looked up at me, shivering violently in his thin hoodie.
"What do I do, Alex?" he asked, his voice childlike, stripped entirely of the smug, dismissive bravado he had carried at the Easter dinner table. "I don't have anywhere to go. The door is broken. The lock is smashed. I don't have five dollars in my account."
I looked at the house. The windows were dark. The peeling green paint on the shutters looked like diseased skin in the streetlights. This was the house where I had studied by candlelight when my mother forgot to pay the electric bill. This was the house where I had listened to my father sigh in defeat every night at the kitchen table.
"Get your things," I said quietly.
Mike blinked, hope flickering in his eyes like a dying candle. "You're taking me with you?"
"No," I said. "You're getting your clothes, your phone, and your personal papers. Then you're getting in a cab to the municipal shelter on 4th Street. Arthur Finch has arranged for a social worker to process you into an emergency job-training program."
May you like
Mike's jaw dropped. "A shelter? Alex, I'm your brother! You live in a two-million-dollar high-rise!"
"And you are a thirty-six-year-old grown man," I said without an ounce of malice. "The wallet is closed, Mike. It closed at Easter. You wanted to make jokes about me being an ATM? Well, the ATM has been unplugged."
