I open my eyes and look at the empty space beside me. How we must look, speaking without even looking at each other.
“I just,” he says, “wished you said something. I wouldn’t have been mad or told Mom and Dad. I would’ve understood.” His voice is soft, careful. “You were always not one for mediocrity.”
The words hang between us like smoke. I shift in the rocking chair and it creaks.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say just as softly back.
“It is. And I would’ve kept it a secret for you. Hell, I would’ve helped you.” He’s quiet for a long time. Then he says, “I just wanted you to know that.”
Over the years, I’d successfully suppressed any thoughts about how Glen must have felt when he found my bed empty. I told myself he was better off. I couldn’t be the big brother to him that he was owed since I’d caused the death of his real one. We were supposed to grow up in awe of Jimmy, forever in his shadow and forever accepting of it. We were supposed to grow up in a mutual place of afterthoughts, only-ifs, and backup plans. I didn’t want to consider, didn’t want to dwell on how Glen might have reacted that morning. Or the morning after. Or the morning after that. For ten years I let him be my little kid brother, frozen in time, head bowed at the dinner table. I left him with nothing. No explanations, no reasons.
And now I’ve done the exact same thing to someone else. Someone who deserved far better.
It’s what I do, it seems; I leave empty spaces, blanks in sentences, and endless dots to be connected, filled, and written in by someone else. I can’t bring things full circle. I can’t bear it to find myself at an ending, and the best way to avoid an ending is to never create a beginning.
“I didn’t leave because of you,” I say. “If you ever thought that, I’m sorry.”
He says nothing. I turn to him. He’s still gazing out at the north pasture, the piece of inheritance I still believe would have been Jimmy’s. I let my gaze focus there.
“When I look out there,” I say, “it just reminds me of him, you know?”
Glen nods. “Yeah. I know.”
“I couldn’t do it.” My voice sounds small. “I couldn’t live up to what they expected after he was gone. And maybe I handled it all wrong, but it was either leave and make my own way or stay and fall short of all their expectations.”
Glen turns toward me, only slightly. “Did you really think I was going to do any better, Ash?”
“Better than me.”
He looks at me finally. “How could you possibly know that?”
I hold his gaze for a minute, then I look beyond him to the place our brother lives in memoriam. I don’t have an answer for him. Not one that I can actually ever say, so instead I say, “I’m sorry, Glen.” I stand. “I’m sorry for hurting your feelings, for not telling you goodbye, for…everything.”
I feel like a bastard just walking off, but I’m drained suddenly.
I find my mother in the sitting room. She’s on the sofa with her sewing. I sit in the chair adjacent to her, watch the needle and thread and feel like a kid again.
For a minute, it doesn’t seem like she knows I’m there. When she looks up, it’s only brief.
“Is there anything you need, Asher?”
“No.”
I watch her needle and thread, her steady hands.
“It’s good to have you home.” She looks at the stitches. “Both my boys home.”
“Yes,” I say. “Home.”
But it would be better if there were three.
After the funeral, I decided that the nice thing to do would be to stay a little longer.
There isn’t much I can do that Glen can’t already do, but our father’s death leaves a gaping hole in the chores. I fall back into line, like I haven’t forgotten a thing, and get up before dawn. I feed livestock, pick zucchini and rhubarb. I pump water from the well and carry it to the stables. I wipe sweat from my brow, rub my back, and fall heavy into the cot just after the sun goes down.
I’d forgotten it could be like this: endless, laborious, carrying a certain rhythm of life and seasons I’d completely erased from my memory.
We both try to get our mother to rest. She habitually wakes to put on the coffee, the expectation that our father will be down to have some before beginning his day. But the two men in her house are not the same as before. My father has been replaced, and I am not adequate.
