Family friend

I’d gone to see the kid a few times. To console myself more than anything, though I don’t like to admit it. It’s never easy. I would ask the kid how he was doing and he would mumble down at his pigeoned-toed feet. He was a lot older now, but he still had those frightened eyes. Emilie hates it when I go to see him.
It does him no good, you going there and reminding him. You just do it cause you feel guilty. And maybe she’s right. I tell her I do it because I owe it to his parents, and I wish it were true. She doesn’t like him much. Think she blames him for the way things have gone. I told her I had stopped dreaming of smoke and twisted limbs, too. But the truth is that their faces are still stained on the back of my eyelids, waiting for night. It was only these visits that stopped them for a time.
The jingle of the doorbell ricochetes through the square brick house. Identical houses line the street like school kids on the first day of summer. Only the wooden number next to the door sets it apart. The green manicured hedges look down on the discoloured, crisp lawn, littered with bindis. The street is bare, the silence as relentless as the empty sky. Inside I heard the tearing of skin from leather and the strain of old knees.
Who is it darl? comes a female voice from the back of the house.
A man with skinny bowed legs poking out the bottom of his stubbies walkes up the hallway toward me. He straightens his sweater over his bloated stomach.
Yes? he says through the fly screen. His teeth are yellowed and wrinkles lined his lips like stitching.
Jake there?
Who’s asking?
I’m a family friend.