He had bought the album at a yard sale for a quarter. He told me about it on the walk to school.
He lowered the needle.
There was a half-second of hiss first. I'd never heard that before. At fifteen, the music I knew came out of a laptop and a pair of earbuds. It started clean.
The first chord came in.
"Just listen."
What I remember isn't the music. I learned the music later by heart, every track, because we played the album approximately two thousand times between that afternoon and graduation. What I remember from that first listen was Bryan's face.
He turned it up toward the ceiling, and his mouth didn't move. His eyes were open, but he didn't track anything. Before the first song was over, he smiled.
I had never watched another person be happy in that specific way before. I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it.
By the time the album ended, he had not moved. Neither had I. Bryan's mother called up the stairs that dinner was in twenty minutes. She had to do it twice.
My thumb was still on the corner of the cardboard. The plastic bin of cords was under my right elbow.
Bryan was dead and had been dead for three years, and the album he'd bought for a quarter was in a cardboard box in my hall closet in Chicago, and I was going to leave it there.
I set the box flush against the back wall of the shelf. My hand stayed on the front edge of the cardboard for one more beat. I straightened a flap and pushed the box another half inch deeper.
I climbed down and closed the closet door. The chair went back to the kitchen.
The phone rang while I was putting the chair back.
Tricia's name on the screen. I wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear and finished sliding the chair under the table.
"You're checking on me."
"I'm calling my little brother."
"On a Saturday morning?"
"I call you on Saturdays."
"You usually call me on Mondays."
There was a pause on her end that meant she was deciding whether to argue the point or concede it. "Fine. You see through me. I'm checking on you."
"Noted."
"So, how are you?"
"I'm good."
She waited.
"I am," I said. "I put the box away. It's in the closet. I won't do anything with it for a while. It will gather dust—in a new closet."
"Where in the closet?"
"Top shelf. Behind the printer box I never opened."
I heard noises in the background. Tricia said something away from the phone in the voice she used for that, patient and final at the same time. Her kid, Eddie, responded immediately, loud and incomprehensible.
"What happened?"
