The Brother Who Came to Live With Me

The hood of my car

She called back two days later and told me to meet her in the plant parking lot at shift change. I brought the form in a manila folder with a pen clipped to it.

It was a hundred and two degrees and the air smelled like the plant, the way that whole side of town does in summer.

She came out in her hairnet and her white plant smock with her lunch cooler in one hand.

She looked tired in a way I had not let myself see before. Her eyes were puffy. She had gotten so thin.

I spread the form on the hood of my car. She read it, every line, with her finger moving under the words, the way she used to read my report cards when I was little.

Then she took the pen and signed her name at the bottom.

“Fine,” she said, handing it back. “One less mouth.”

She turned and walked toward her car. But she stopped after about ten steps, with her back to me, and she said, without turning around, “Make sure he eats breakfast. He won’t, unless you make him.”

Then she drove away, and I stood there holding a manila folder in the heat, not sure whether I had won something or lost something. I still think it was a little of both.

Moving day

Caleb moved in on a Saturday. Everything he owned fit into the back seat of my car and two black trash bags in the trunk.

His clothes, his basketball, his old game system, a box of comic books, and a shoebox he would not let me carry.

Rick helped carry the trash bags out to the car. He did not say much. He never did.

But he shook Caleb’s hand at the curb like you would shake a man’s hand, and he said, “You call your mother. You hear me?”

“Yes sir,” Caleb said.

Then Rick looked at me and nodded once, and I think that nod was the closest thing to an apology I was ever going to get from him.

He went back inside and the screen door slapped shut behind him. Mom did not come out of the house.

I had been sleeping on a mattress in the bigger bedroom and using the second one for my sewing machine and laundry basket.

I moved the sewing machine into a corner of my room. A lady from church sold me a twin bed frame out of her garage for twenty-five dollars.

That first night Caleb sat on the edge of the twin bed and opened the shoebox.

Inside were three things: a picture of our dad holding him as a baby, a Razorbacks cap that had been Dad’s, and a bank envelope with the plant’s credit union printed on it.

The envelope was empty. He folded it in half and put it in the trash can by the bed, and he did not say a word about it, and neither did I.