The Call I Made to My Brother First

“Come up,” I said. “He wants you.”

He came across the lot to me walking fast, almost running, in yesterday’s shirt with his cap in his hand. He stopped about three feet from me.

His eyes were red all the way around. He had not shaved. He looked about seventy years old and about twelve, both at once.

Before I could say anything, he put his hand in his shirt pocket and held it out to me and opened it.

Two little brass valve cores sat in his palm. He had carried them over his heart for a whole day and a night.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Greta. I don’t know what I was thinking. I do know. I’m sorry.”

I took them. They were warm from his pocket. I closed my hand around them and did not say anything yet.

“You’d have said do it right, do it once,” Bert said. His voice was shaking. “You said it Friday night. You said it in that little room. Just like you said it about Mom.”

And there it was. The thing neither of us had said out loud in six years.

When Mom’s heart valve started to fail, the doctors in Lexington gave us a choice too. Medicine and wait, or the big surgery to replace the valve. Mom was seventy. She was tired and she was scared, and she asked us what we thought.

Bert wanted to wait. Bert wanted to try the medicine for a while and see how she did.

I was the one who said do it right, do it now, do it once. I said it to her and I said it to Dad and I said it to Bert. I was so sure. I am always so sure.

Mom went into that surgery on a Tuesday morning. She never woke up right afterward. She lived nine more days on machines, and then she was gone.

Nobody ever told me it was my fault. Not Dad, not Bert, not the doctors. The doctors said it was a reasonable choice and that sometimes these things go the way they go.

“I couldn’t sit in that room and hear you say it again,” Bert said. “I couldn’t, Greta. If you had been there, you’d have talked about doing it right, and I’d have looked at you and said okay. I always say okay. And then if Dad went in and didn’t come out…”

He stopped. He wiped his face with his cap.

“I’d have lost him and I’d have lost you too,” he said. “Because I’d never have forgiven you. And I’d never have forgiven me for saying okay.”

I stood there in that lot with the valve cores in my fist and the sky going pink behind the parking garage. And I did not have anything to say back to him, because he was right.

I would have pushed. I know I would have. I would have sat in that consult and asked my good mechanic questions and talked about doing it once. And Bert would have said okay.

But Bert was scared of losing Dad on a table the way we lost Mom. And he was scared of me. And what he did about it was wrong, and mean, and cost me six hundred dollars and the worst drive of my life.

“You owe Percy Fultz six hundred dollars,” I said finally.

Bert let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something else. “I’ll pay him today.”