The Buick We Brought Our Boy Home In

Every Fridge In The Family

We printed that picture at the drugstore the next week. A whole stack of them, four by six, glossy.

It is on our refrigerator. It is on my mother’s, held up by a magnet shaped like Illinois.

It is on my aunt’s fridge out in Danville. It is stuck to the side of my uncle’s gun safe.

It went in Grandpa Roy’s Bible, the one with my grandmother’s handwriting in the front cover.

My mother called me the day her copy came in the mail. She had heard the whole story by then, the way families always do.

The RAV4 and the two thousand dollars and the dollar out in the shed. She was quiet a second.

“Your grandpa’s been lighter this week than I’ve seen him since we buried your grandmother,” she said. “That car just sat out there reminding him of her. Now look what it’s doing instead.”

She told me he had called every one of his kids and his sisters and read them the whole thing off a piece of paper he had written out longhand.

“He said he got the better end of the deal,” my mother told me. “He said he traded a dollar for a reason to get up Sunday mornings. I had to hang up, Travis. I couldn’t talk.”

I had to set the phone down a minute too.

Kyle’s RAV4 sat in his driveway through all of February and into March.

He had bumped the price counting on me being stuck with no other move. I was not stuck. So the thing just sat there wearing a coat of salt.

That little laminated for-sale sign curled up in the back window as the weeks went by.

I heard he finally dropped it back to fourteen and let it go to a stranger off the online marketplace, middle of March.

He has not said much to me since. At my mother’s one Sunday he stood looking at the photo on her fridge for a long minute.

The one of Grandpa and Mason. Then he looked over at me, and something crossed his face that I think was shame.

I did not rub it in. Ruth down at the church would not have stood for that, and neither would I.

“That a nice car?” he finally asked. Quiet. Not like himself at all.

“Runs like a top,” I said. “You’re welcome to ride in it sometime.”

I meant it, too. He is still my brother.

My mother raised us both and she did not raise me to keep a man out in the cold forever, not even one who earned it for a while.

The door is open if he ever wants to walk back through it decent. But he is the one who has to do the walking.

I think he knows that now. And maybe that is its own kind of lesson, learned a good deal slower than money.

A week after Mason came, a card showed up in the mail with a hundred-dollar bill folded inside and Kyle’s handwriting on it. It just said, “For the baby. I’m sorry.” No more than that.

I did not send it back. I put it in Mason’s account at the credit union, the same one where the coffee-can money went. I figure my brother can start paying his way back one hundred dollars at a time, same as the rest of us earn everything out here.

Grandma would have told him the same. And she would have hugged him after.