The Playhouse at Both Houses

My brother

My brother Benny came by Friday evening. Benny farms wheat and milo with our uncle out past Industry and has never in his life kept an opinion to himself.

We stood out in the yard by his pickup while the girls ran around the dead square of grass with the dog.

The sun was going down orange over the shelterbelt and you could smell somebody burning trash a mile south.

“You’re going over there,” he said. “To her house. To paint the thing he stole. Leona, have you lost your mind? Let me get a couple of the guys from church and a flatbed. We’ll have it back here by noon.”

“And then what,” I said. “Then he comes and takes it again. And then you go get it again. And the girls stand on the porch steps every Saturday and watch it go back and forth like a tug of war, with them for the rope.”

“He doesn’t deserve it,” he said finally. “Being nice to him. He doesn’t deserve one thing from you, and I’ll say that to his face.”

“No,” I said. “He doesn’t. But the girls do. And if I’m going over there anyway, I’d rather walk in carrying paint than carrying a grudge. A grudge you can’t hand to a six year old. A paint brush you can.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he put his hand on top of my head, the way he used to when we were kids and he was being a big brother, and he said if I needed him I should call, and he’d be there before I hung up.

Saturday

Saturday came up sunny and still, which in Kansas in September is the closest thing to a gift you’ll get. No wind. Not even the usual southwest breeze.

I put my hair up in a ponytail, pulled on my old denim shirt for painting, loaded the paint and the girls in the car, and we drove west.

Dawn’s house was on the north side of Salina, a little brick ranch on a street of little brick ranches, with a chain link fence around the backyard and a single young maple tree staked up against the wind.

I’d driven past it once that spring. I’m not proud of that either.

Archie was waiting in the backyard when we came around the side of the house. His black hair was cut short for summer, the way he always kept it.

He had his hands in his pockets and he was wearing a gray T-shirt with a hole at the collar that I recognized, because I bought it for him at the Walmart in Abilene.

He looked at me like I had come to fight. I think he had been up half the night figuring out what he would say when I did, and he did not know what to do with his hands when I didn’t.