The Thing About Kevin

By Beem Weeks

Jacob Radner returns to his suburban Chicago roots to bury his departed father. The family is all there—except for older brother Kevin. Thirty-seven years earlier, Kevin Radner walked out the front door and vanished. Will this prodigal son return and finally make peace with the ghost of his mobster father? As the patriarch’s body is lowered into the earth, long-hidden family secrets become uncovered: a former girlfriend, a child born out of wedlock and adopted out, a mother willfully blind to the sins of the father. In this novella, author Beem Weeks examines the notion that sometimes those closest to us are the very ones we should fear most.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fresh Ink Group
• Release date: Feb 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781947867901

Book preview

Bandra.

The Thing About Kevin

Daddy’s dead. My sister Myra’s voice filtered through the phone, calm and settled, as if she just told me Walmart offered cans of cling peaches two for a buck.

Her news didn’t come as any sort of shock or surprise—certainly not unexpected. My father had been in poor health for the past three years—ever since a stroke robbed him of speech and common decency. God forbid, you didn’t understand what his guttural grunts and groans meant. He’d take that shit personally, convinced those closest to him harbored notions of disrespect. And Dad, well, he’d always been big on respect.

When’s the funeral? I asked.

Sarcasm laid an edge to her words, left them sharp and pointed. Don’t sound so broken up about it, Jacob.

He’ll never be mistaken for a nice guy, Myra. Nobody’s going to miss him.

Mom misses him.

Ouch!

Nailed me square in the chest with that one, she did.

Don’t get me wrong. I have all sorts of fond memories of my father. There must have been a hundred summer afternoons spent at Wrigley Field, watching the Cubs play—just me and him and my older brother, Kevin. As a family, we’d spent every spring break in Florida, all the way down in Key West. And he never once missed a birthday or his anniversary or my sister’s ballet recitals.

But all that good-guy stuff can’t negate the darker side. Like the time a man flipped him the middle finger over some meaningless traffic disagreement. My father, he’d never allow such a blatant show of disrespect to go unchallenged. If you allow it to stand, he’d say, they’ll walk all over a guy for life. And by they he meant any fool dumb enough to challenge him. So he followed the guy for two blocks, caught him at an intersection, yanked the poor bastard from his car, and beat him stupid right there in the middle of the street.

I sat there in the car.

I saw every brutal punch.

People feared him, Myra, I said. There’s probably going to be a few celebrations tonight.

Myra shifted the conversation. "Before I forget, happy belated birthday, you rotten old