The Recliner I Carried to the Camper

Then I went back to the house and got Mike’s pillow off the spare bed and put it on the camper mattress, right under the stain on the ceiling.

I set the bucket on the floor next to the bed where he would find it.

When I came back across the yard, Kylie was gone. I found her in the back bedroom, standing on the bed in her socks, with a hammer and two nails in her mouth.

Over the headboard she had hung a football jersey. Faded red, number twenty-two, with a tear in one sleeve that somebody had sewn up a long time ago.

It was Danny’s from high school. His senior year, he ran for more yards than anybody in the county. Mike was six years older and had played on the line himself, and growing up in the backyard he always said his only job was to keep Danny clean.

The jersey had been in a box in our garage since Danny’s apartment was cleared out. I did not even know Kylie knew it was there.

“I wanted him to have something of his up here,” she said around the nails. “Something that’s not medical stuff.”

I wheeled Danny in to see it. He sat in the doorway, the thirty-six inch doorway my grandpa cut with a handsaw, and he looked up at that jersey for a long time.

Then he turned his chair around and looked out the window for a while. Kylie and I let him. Nobody needed to say anything.

“I used to be fast,” he said finally, to the window. “You should have seen me, Kylie-bug. I used to be so fast.”

“I know you were,” Kylie said. “Dad tells everybody.”

The afternoon was long. I did laundry. I cleaned the shop bathroom and put the door back on its hinges. I sat in the spare room and looked at the ledger and did not open it.

Danny took a nap in the big bed. The first real nap, he said later, that he had had since August. He did not wake up until almost four.

Around five I put a roast in. Mike likes a roast on Saturday, with the potatoes and carrots cooked in with it. I was not going to punish him with supper. That is not who I am.

I set four places at the table. I put the green ledger book by my plate, face down.

At a quarter to seven his truck came up the drive. I heard the diesel shut off, and the door slam, and his boots on the porch planks, which he stopped and looked at for a second before he came on up.

Mike came in tired and dirty, with sawdust in his hair and his welding cap still on. He set his lunch box on the counter and kissed the top of Kylie’s head like he always does.

Then he saw his brother sitting at the kitchen table.

“Hey, Danny,” he said, surprised. “Didn’t know you were eating with us tonight. That’s good. That’s real good.”

He went down the hall to wash up. I heard him stop. I heard him stand there a long time, in the doorway of the back bedroom, looking at his brother’s things and that red jersey over his own bed.