The Brother My Father Never Named

The Auction

The house came up for sale the spring after the man who bought it from the bank passed away with no children to leave it to. I found the notice by accident, scrolling through county auction listings on my lunch break, and I nearly dropped my sandwich in the parking lot.

I drove out there before I told a single soul. The paint had gone gray and the porch had a lean to it that worried me more than a little, and the yard was mostly broom sedge and blackberry canes gone wild over the fence line. It looked smaller than the house in my memory, the way places from childhood always do. But when I stood on that porch and looked out at the ridge behind it, the same ridge I used to watch turn every color of fall from my bedroom window, something in my chest came loose that had been tight since I was sixteen years old.

The auction was held on the courthouse steps on a Tuesday morning in April. There were maybe a dozen of us there, mostly men who did this for a living, flipping foreclosures and estate sales for profit. I had forty eight thousand dollars in that savings account and I had promised myself I would walk away the second the number passed it.

It never got close. Nobody else wanted a leaning porch and a roof that needed work. I got it for forty six thousand dollars, and when the auctioneer handed me the paper that made it mine, my hands were shaking too hard to sign my own name on the first try.

I called my mother from the courthouse steps. I did not tell her what I had just done. I told her I would come see her Sunday, and I let her believe it was nothing more than that.