The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire
“Amy.”
“And I called Jenna last night to tell her I was sorry I sat there. She didn’t pick up. I don’t blame her.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry I sat there.”
I nodded at her. It was all I could manage.
Then Tyler moved. He walked around the fire pit, all the way around the outside of the circle so he would not have to pass his father, and he came and stood on the other side of my dad. Ben was right behind him. My father put a hand on each of their heads, like he was counting them.
Kyle stood alone on his side of the ashes.
He looked at me last. I think he was hoping I would finally give him the thing he knew how to handle. A thrown glass. A scream. Something he could point at.
“You going to say anything?” he said. “Or just stand there?”
“I didn’t say anything yesterday because Noah was watching me,” I said. “I wanted him to see that when somebody burns what you love, you don’t have to stay and take it, and you don’t have to burn something back. You can pick up what’s yours and go.”
I kept my voice level. It was not easy.
“I’m only here today because Dad asked me. He did the hard part. I don’t have anything to add to it.”
Kyle set his beer down on a fence post. He walked to his truck. He got in and shut the door, and he sat there behind the wheel with the engine off.
Nobody went after him. My mother started to, and my father said, “Leave him sit, Sue,” very gently, and she stopped.
What he said to Noah
He sat in that truck for forty minutes.
The rest of us ate cold chicken and leftover corn, because that is what people in South Dakota do when they do not know what else to do. Ben showed Noah the barn kittens. Tyler stayed close to my father’s chair and did not say much, but he stayed.
I was at the picnic table when the truck door opened.
Kyle walked across the yard slowly. His face looked different. Not softer, exactly. More like a house with the siding pulled off, where you can suddenly see how it was put together.
He stopped about ten feet from Noah, who had come back to lean against my leg.
Kyle got down on one knee in the grass. My brother is a big man, and it was not a graceful thing to watch.
“Noah,” he said.
Noah got behind my hip.
“I shouldn’t have done that to your animals. It was a rotten thing to do.” He had to stop and clear his throat. “I thought I was helping. I wasn’t. And I can’t get them back for you. I’d like to, and I can’t.”
Noah looked up at me. I told him with my eyes that it was his to answer or not.
“You can’t have Clover,” he said.
“No,” Kyle said. “I can’t. He’s yours.”
“Grandma fixed him.”
“I heard she did.”
“You have to say sorry to Tyler and Ben too. You did theirs.”
Kyle’s face came apart at that. He put his hand over his eyes, right there on one knee in my mother’s yard, with fourteen people trying not to look.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
He did not say it to me. He never has, in so many words, and I have decided I can live with that. He said it to the ones who needed it. I watched him walk over to his sons, and I watched Tyler hold very still, and I do not know what was said, because it was not mine to hear.