“I’m done thinking about you.”
I dialed.
Three numbers.
Dale sat down on my bottom stair and put his head in his hands.
He wasn’t a hard man, really.
Just a man who’d been handed a lie so big and so comfortable he never once looked under it.
Earl sat down in my mother’s chair.
The fight went out of him all at once.
He looked small.
I’d spent my whole life thinking he was the strong one.
He was just the one willing to lie.
The dispatcher answered.
I gave my address.
I said there’d been a break-in.
And then I said there was a great deal more than that, and they’d want to send someone who could stay a while.
I hung up.
The house was so quiet.
Walt came and stood beside me.
He set the recorder on the table, red light still glowing.
He took my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I thanked him. I’m sorry I believed him. I’m sorry I walked away from that gra.ve and didn’t dig until I found the truth.”
“You didn’t know,” I said.
“I should have known. Something in me always knew.”
“Me too,” I whispered.
And it was true.
Some nights, over fifty-three years, I’d wake certain he was out there.
I’d tell myself it was grief playing tricks.
It wasn’t grief.
It was him.
Out there the whole time.
Thinking the same of me.
We stood in the hall and we didn’t say anything for a while.
Earl stared at the floor.
Dale wept quietly on the stairs.
Rain came through the broken window and darkened the edge of the rug.
Then Walt laughed.
Soft.
Wet-eyed.
“Would you look at us,” he said.
“Two old ruins. Finally in the same room.”
“You still have your hair,” I said.
“You still have your temper,” he said.
And somehow, both of us were laughing.
Laughing in that terrible hall with my brother in handcuffs coming and my nephew in pieces.
Laughing because the alternative was fifty-three years of weeping and we’d already done that apart.
He reached into his pocket.
