The Winter I Left My Brother the Bills

He had a barbecue trailer back then, and a catering business, and a sign painted on the side with flames. The business went under in about two years, and he came home.

He never left. He never paid rent. As far as I knew he never paid a gas bill, a water bill or an electric bill.

He bought the milk sometimes. Mom always said that like it was a thing to be grateful for.

I went back out to the counter and finished my shift. Then I did something I am allowed to do as a customer, which was pay for my father’s prescriptions with my own debit card, $96, and put the bag in my purse.

My parents live in the two-story house on Linden Street where Matt and I grew up.

I let myself in the side door at a quarter to six. The first thing I noticed was the cold.

Not outdoor cold, but that heavy indoor chill an old house gets when somebody has been turning the heat down to save money.

The thermostat in the dining room said 62. My mother was standing at the stove in two sweaters, stirring a pot of chicken and noodles, and she looked up at me and then down at my purse, because she knew.

My father was in his chair in the front room under an afghan, in his tan cardigan, watching the news with the sound low.

He is seventy-two. He worked thirty-four years at the foundry over in Bluffton, and he has hands like baseball mitts.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, and I knelt down in front of him and lifted the afghan off his feet.

His ankles were swollen up over the tops of his socks like rising bread. I pressed my thumb into his shin, and the dent stayed.

“Don’t start,” he said, but there was no fight in it.

“I’m not starting,” I said. “I’m just looking.” I got him a glass of water and opened the bag and handed him his evening pills, and he took them without arguing, which scared me more than anything else that night.

Then I stood in the kitchen doorway and listened. Under the floor, I could hear the television in the basement, loud, some ball game.

And I could hear the fan of a space heater, that steady electric hum.

Matt’s door at the bottom of the stairs was cracked open, and warm air was coming up the stairwell.

It was warm enough down there for shorts. I did not go down. I stood at the top of those stairs and I did not go down.

I want to be honest about why. It was not because I was being good.

It was because if I had gone down those stairs, I would have said things to my brother that I could never take back, and my mother would have heard every one.

My mother came up behind me and put her hand on my back. “Please, Erin,” she said quietly.

“Please don’t make a fight of it. Not at Christmas. Your father can’t take a fight, and Matty is having a hard time.”

My father called from the front room. “Leave it alone, honey. We’re fine. He’s our boy.”

So I left it alone. I kissed them both, I put the pill bottles on the counter where Mom would see them, and I drove home across town with my hands so tight on the steering wheel that they ached the whole next day.