Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)

by Benjamin Stevenson

Evasive as I am, even I can’t argue with bold type.

But age gives perspective, and now I know the difference between being popular and being talked about.

Something you should know about me is that I like to look at everything two ways. I’m always trying to see both sides of the coin.

My father was footprints, residue.

Without seeming too interested, I tried to read my mother’s expression. It was unfamiliar to me, so I figured it must have been warm and welcoming.

I found myself looking at the medal above the fireplace, thinking about what my mother had said: some people were awarded for killing.

“Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.”

I noticed that her lips were wind-chapped in the way mountaineers’ lips often are, peeling and crevassed, like you could stick an icepick in and climb them.

What a sentence

In books like this, you should never believe someone is dead until you’ve actually seen a body. They tend to show up. We’ve all read And Then There Were None.

It’s all well and good for the heroes to play cops and robbers in novels and on TV, but in real life it’s the side characters, the Cunninghams, who take the blows, who bear the pain, so someone else can raise their arms aloft in victory.