The Gate My Brother Could Not Open

It kept going like that for twenty-four years. I am not going to list every single thing, because you would stop believing me, it starts to sound made up when you put it all in a row. But I will give you a few, so you know the shape of it.

There was the year Brett’s business hit a rough patch (there was always a rough patch, Brett’s whole life was rough patches he narrated like victories) and he needed to buy a new truck to “look successful for the clients,” and his credit was a wreck, and so it was me who co-signed the note. Forty-one thousand dollars on a diesel I never drove and never wanted. He made payments for about a year and a half and then they got “tight,” and I made the rest of them, four years of them, out of my operating account, because if I had not the bank would have come after my land. Brett has never mentioned that truck to me again. I believe he has honestly forgotten it. That is the thing about people like my brother. They do not carry what they take. Only the person they took it from carries it.

There was the summer Brett and Paige were “going through something” and they sent their two boys to stay with us on the farm. Three months. Two city teenagers who had never worked a day, and I taught them to drive the Ranger and run the hay and pull a calf, and Dana fed them like they were her own and washed their clothes and sat up with the younger one the night he got homesick and cried, and at the end of August Brett rolled up, tan from a trip to the lake he had somehow found time and money for, and he loaded the boys up and said, “Hope they weren’t too much trouble,” and that was it. No thank-you. His wife posted a picture that night of the four of them at a steakhouse, “So blessed to have my boys home, family is everything.” I about put my fist through the wall.

There was my cousin Dale who needed eight hundred dollars to keep his lights on, and the cousin who needed a place to park his camper for “a few weeks” that turned into eleven months, and the aunt who needed somebody to drive to Oklahoma City at two in the morning when her husband had his stroke, and every single Thanksgiving and every single Christmas and every single Easter, because “Wade’s got the big table and the room out there,” hosted at my house, cooked by my wife, paid for out of my pocket, cleaned up by the two of us at midnight while everybody else drove home full.

And every single time, somehow, the gratitude went to Brett. I could never figure out the mechanics of it for the longest time. Brett would show up to the Thanksgiving I paid for and cooked, carve the turkey like he was the host, tell a few stories, and leave early, and my mother would call me the next day and say, “Wasn’t it wonderful having Brett there, he just lights up a room.” Like Brett was the gift. Like I was the furniture the gift got set on.