“I had the Thursday night game covered,” he said. “A sure thing, Lee. I figured I’d turn the six-forty into three grand and buy it all back before anybody knew. The kid never goes in the barn.”
“The kid is eighteen years old.”
“I know how old he is.”
“He stacked hay for that. Do you remember what his hands looked like?”
“I said I was going to buy it back.” His voice cracked at the end of the sentence, and I will tell you honestly that part of me wanted to forgive him right there.
He is my little brother. I taught him to ride a bike on that same gravel lane. But the part of me that had stood at the glass case in Mansfield was louder, and it said: he sold it on Friday.
He looked at you on Sunday after church and asked how Lucas was feeling about school. He had four days to say it, and he said nothing.
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“You didn’t win,” I said.
“No.”
“What did the game do?”
He did not answer.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up before either of us could say anything more.
I did not drive to his house.
I did not post anything about him online, though my phone was in my hand and my thumb was ready.
What I wanted was not to ruin my brother. What I wanted was to get a boy to class on Monday.
I went home and sat at the kitchen table. At two in the afternoon the house was quiet, and the clock over the stove ticked, and I took an index card out of the junk drawer. A plain white index card, three by five, the kind I keep for recipes I never write down.
Lucas came in from his job at the farm supply around five thirty. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me, and at the card, and at the pen.
“Mom,” he said. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“The college has loaner tools. In the crib. For the first couple weeks.”
“I know that too.”
“Everybody is going to see me using the school’s stuff. Everybody else will have their own.”
I looked up at him then.
“Lucas,” I said. “Is that what you want? To borrow from the crib?”
He thought about it. He is not a fast talker. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down in it with both elbows on the table, and for a minute he looked about twelve years old.
“I want my tools back,” he said. “I know I can’t have them. But I want it to be, I don’t know. I want somebody to be on my side.”
That was the sentence that did it. I have turned it over and over since. A boy of eighteen does not usually say that out loud, and he said it to the table, not to me.
“Then let me ask,” I said.
I wrote six sentences. I took my time, because I wanted every one of them to be true and none of them to be a weapon. I did not write my brother’s name. I did not write a dollar amount.