The Night I Drove Three Hours for My Kids

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I did that.”

I want to tell you I felt good. I didn’t. I felt like I had swallowed a stone. This was the man who held Josh at his baptism. Who taught Tom to tie a tie for our wedding, because nobody else ever had.

“If you ever want to see them again,” I said, “you know what you have to do. I’m not going to tell you how. You’re a grown man. But it won’t be because I let it slide.”

There was a long silence.

“I know,” he said. “I’ve known for a while. I just didn’t want to know.”

Tom held out his hand for the phone. I gave it to him.

“Darrell,” Tom said. “I’m sorry for what I said last night. About Carla leaving. That was low, and I knew it was low when I said it.”

“It was true,” Darrell said.

“It was still low.”

They stayed on the line a while longer without saying much. I went out to the back step and sat in the morning cool with my coffee and let the two of them be brothers for a minute, whatever that looked like now.

The Fall

He didn’t call again that month. Not once. He did what the note said.

Howard called the second week to check on us. He had told the park manager everything, straight, and somebody from the county called me a few days later to make sure the kids were home and safe. They were. That was the end of that.

Josh went quiet about his uncle in a way that worried me. He took the old fishing pole Darrell gave him for his ninth birthday and stood it in the back of his closet, behind the winter coats.

On the first Sunday in September, Darrell called Tom. He had been sober twenty-six days. He said it like that, a number, like he was afraid it wouldn’t count if he rounded it.

His doctor had sent him to a counselor, and there was a bed opening at a twenty-eight day residential program up near Center City. He needed somebody to drive him in. He didn’t want to ask anybody else.

Tom had just been cleared to drive. He looked at me across the kitchen, and I handed him the keys to the van.

They were two hours in the car. Tom said they hardly spoke until the last ten minutes, and then Darrell talked and didn’t stop. He’d needed the money back because he had quit paying his own bills, and it was easier to be angry at his little brother than to admit it.

“He said that envelope was the first time in six years anybody told him no,” Tom said. “Everybody kept covering for him. Us too, Beck.”

He was right. I don’t think I was wrong to trust Darrell. I think I was wrong not to look harder.

In October he came home with a sponsor, a retired railroad conductor named Jim, and meetings three nights a week in a church basement. He sent us a four-page letter in those big square letters, with a check for $200 inside. On the memo line it said “for the furnace.”