The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

Kyle’s boys were standing a few feet behind him. Tyler is eleven and Ben is eight. They were watching the fire too.

They did not look surprised. I did not understand what that meant yet. I only noticed it, the way you notice a wrong note in a hymn, and kept moving.

I have a temper. My whole family knows it. When I was sixteen I threw a full glass of iced tea at Kyle across that very picnic table. Every person in that yard was waiting to see what I would throw this time.

I did not yell.

I did not say one thing to my brother.

I walked over and picked up my son. He is getting heavy for it, all knees and elbows, but he wrapped himself around me the way he did when he was two. I bent down, with him on my hip, and picked up the empty backpack.

Then I walked past all of them to my car.

“Oh, come on, Jenna,” Kyle called after me. “It’s a joke. Dad, tell her it’s a joke.”

My father did not tell me anything.

“Jenna, honey, wait.” My mother had gotten up. I heard her sandals in the grass. “Let me just, wait, let me see if I can get them out.”

I kept walking. I buckled Noah into his booster seat. I put the empty backpack in his lap because he was reaching for it.

I backed down the gravel drive past the shelterbelt and the machine shed and the mailbox my father painted to look like a John Deere when I was nine. In the mirror I could see my mother standing at the fire pit with her hand over her mouth, and Kyle laughing at something, and my father still in his chair.

The nine miles home

My parents’ acreage is nine miles northwest of Yankton, off a county road that turns to washboard every August. I rent a small yellow house in town, four blocks from the dental office where I clean teeth for a living.

Noah did not speak for most of those nine miles. He held the backpack with both arms and looked out the window at the bean fields going gold.

We reached the highway. I stopped at the sign.

“Mom,” he said. “Did Clover hurt?”

I had to pull over. I put the car in park on the shoulder with the hazard lights going and I turned around in my seat.

“No, buddy,” I said. “Clover couldn’t feel it. I promise.”

“Gus either?”

“Gus either. Or Radar.”

He thought about that for a while. A grain truck went by and rocked the car.

“Uncle Kyle said I could have them back when I quit being a baby,” he said. “Then he put them in. So I don’t know how I get them back now.”

I have never in my life wanted to turn a car around so badly. I could feel it in my hands on the wheel.

But I looked at my son’s face, and I understood that whatever I did in the next minute was the thing he would remember. Not what Kyle did. What I did.

“You are not a baby,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Uncle Kyle did something wrong, and it was a big one, and that is why we left.”

“Are you mad?”

“I’m very mad. I’m not mad at you.”

“You didn’t yell.”

“No.”

“You always say when somebody’s being mean you can just go,” he said. “You don’t have to stay and be mean back.”

I do say that. I say it about the playground. I had never once thought of it as something that applied to me.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s what we did.”

He nodded, and he laid his cheek on the empty backpack, and I drove us home.