The Five Years My Brother Kept Us

Marcy married a man from Hastings two years later. Curt went to the wedding and gave them a toaster.

“The ring?” I whispered. I don’t know why I asked.

“Sold it back to Hanson’s that spring for fourteen hundred. Jim Hanson sits two pews behind me at church. He said Curt came in on a Tuesday in his work jacket and never said why.”

I did the math right there at the register with a roll of tape in my hand. That spring Piper had her tonsils out. The plan at my job did not cover them, and the bill came to $1,400, and Curt told me he’d put it on a payment plan. He said it was no trouble.

There was no payment plan. There was a ring.

I paid for my tape. I sat in the lot with both hands on the wheel and cried so hard I could not see the pumps. For five years I had wondered why my brother had no one, and in none of my stories was it me. I should have seen it. The proof had been at my own table every Sunday.

Locust Street

Two men from Curt’s line crew, Lonnie and Ty, showed up at eight with a trailer and did not ask a single question. Gene Hovorka, who retired from the district years back, unlocked Apartment 2 and handed Curt the keys with the receipt already written out. I came back with swollen eyes and nobody said a word about it. That is how men like that are. They carried my couch.

Midmorning I went out to Curt’s truck for the tape gun and flipped the visor down against the glare, and a work order fell into my lap. On the back, in his square handwriting: rent, 725 times 60, 43,500. Sitter, 280 times 60, 16,800. Sixty thousand, three hundred. No name, no note.

Brenda had been close. Curt had been exact. He had known to the dollar for who knows how long, and had never once held it up.

I put the paper back behind the visor where I found it.

The bed was last. It was the white twin frame he had put together once before, five years ago, in the middle bedroom on Linden Street. He knelt on the carpet of the small bedroom with the hex key and the loose slats, and Piper sat cross-legged a few feet away and held the headboard up without being asked.

“You don’t have to hold it,” he said.

“I know,” she said. She held it.

I stood in the doorway with a box of folded sheets on my hip and watched my brother’s big scarred hands turn a small hex key the way they once turned a braid. I watched my daughter watch him.