That night Gelon and I paced the city, round and round we went, ten or eleven years old, and I asked him what we were going to do. And he smiled; his eyes were violet with bruises, his lip busted, and then he started into the first book of The Odyssey, and for a while, I didn’t care that I was poor or that Ma and I were alone ’cause my da did a runner, and now I’d betrayed her. I didn’t care about anything but the words he was saying. After that, we were inseparable. Even when he got married and had a son, he always had me around, made me part of his family. Yet here I am drunk, crowing about
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