The Fiance Who Wanted My Brothers Gone

I was twenty-four and I buried my parents on a Friday and I took my two little brothers home on a Saturday. There was never a question in my mind about it. Some things you do not decide. You just do them, the way you do not decide to catch something somebody throws at your face. Your arms just come up.

So that is who I was when Garrett Pruitt started paying attention to me. A twenty-four-year-old hairdresser raising her dead parents’ twins in a two-bedroom rental out on Dody Hollow road, with a casserole schedule from the church ladies taped to the refrigerator and a county caseworker who came by once a month to make sure I had not lost my mind.

Let me tell you about Jesse, because Jesse is at the center of all of this and I will not have you thinking of him as a problem, which is the only way Garrett ever learned to think of him.

Jesse has epilepsy. It started about four months after the funeral. The doctors up in Cookeville told me it can come on in a child after a big shock, and I do not know if losing your mama and daddy at seven counts as the kind of shock they meant, but I know my brother started having seizures that spring and he has had them since. Caleb, his twin, does not have them. That is the strange thing about those two. Same face, same cowlick, same gap in the front teeth, and one of them falls down shaking three or four times a month and the other one has never had a thing wrong with him except a broke arm off the Hendricks’ trampoline.

When Jesse has a seizure, here is what you do, and I could do it in my sleep and have. You get him down easy so he does not crack his head. You turn him on his side. You move anything hard away from him. You do not put anything in his mouth, no matter what your grandmother told you. You look at your watch, because if it goes past five minutes you call the ambulance, and you talk to him low the whole time even though he cannot hear you, because when he comes back he is scared and confused and he needs the first thing he knows to be your voice. Then you hold him while he cries, because he always cries after, and he says he is sorry, and you tell him there is nothing on this earth for him to be sorry for.

That is my brother. He is a sweet, funny, tenderhearted boy who likes to draw tractors and who cannot help the thing his body does. Caleb is the loud one, the one who will talk your ear off about the Titans. Jesse is the one who sits close and leans on you. Keep both of them in your mind.

Now. Garrett.