The Winter I Left My Brother the Bills

I got Dad into the passenger seat with the heat on high. Mom got in the back with her pillow on her lap.

I put the suitcase in the trunk, and I stood there for a second in the snow with the trunk lid up, so nobody would see my face.

“You didn’t yell,” my mother said when I got in. She sounded surprised.

“No,” I said.

“I thought you would.”

“I know you did,” I said, and I backed out of the driveway on Linden Street, and nobody said anything else the whole way across town.

The first week was hard in the ordinary ways. Mom did not know where my dish towels went. Dad did not like my coffee.

But every morning at six I stood at my kitchen counter with Dad’s bottles and that Sunday to Saturday box, and I filled the morning row and the evening row, and I watched him take them with his oatmeal.

Every night I knelt down in front of that recliner by the window and pressed my thumb into his shin. On the fourth night, the dent did not stay.

On the sixth night his socks fit like socks again. I went into the bathroom and cried with the water running.

My house is kept at 70 degrees. Mom kept saying it was too warm, and then she stopped saying it, and on the fifth day I came home from work and found her asleep on the couch in the afternoon with her shoes off, which I had not seen her do in maybe twenty years.

Dad took to that recliner by the window like it had been built for him.

He could see the county road from it, and the grain trucks going by to the elevator, and the school bus, and the mailman.

He called out every car. “That’s the Yoder girl. She’s driving too fast.”

Chris and Dad found each other in a way that surprised me. They sat up after supper and watched the Browns lose.

Chris asked him about the foundry. Dad asked Chris about propane prices. Two men who had never had a long conversation in nine years of family dinners.

I did not hear from Matt for eight days. Then on a Sunday he texted me. It said: how much is the gas usually. That was all. No hello. No question mark.

I wrote back: About $210 in December. More in January. Keep the thermostat at 66 or above or the pipes in the back wall can freeze. Dad wrapped them, but that wall is old.

He did not write back. But I drove by the house on Linden Street the next night after work, and I saw that the walk had been shoveled.

Not well. But shoveled. And the Pruitt boy’s sled was not out front, so it was not the Pruitt boy.

Christmas came. We had it at my house, the first Christmas in my whole life that was not on Linden Street.

Mom made her pierogi in my kitchen and covered every counter in flour, and I let her, and it was the best mess I have ever had to clean up.

Matt came over for about forty minutes on Christmas Eve. He brought a pumpkin pie from the grocery store with the price sticker still on the plastic lid.

“Hi, Dad,” he said. Dad was in the recliner by the window.

He looked up at Matt, and he said, “Merry Christmas, son,” and he held out his hand, and Matt crossed the room and shook it like a man shaking hands at a funeral.