“Then I wouldn’t be your little brother.”
“What happened to Adam?” This was his last boyfriend, a nurse.
“He decided to date someone less stressed out about his job. An air traffic controller.” When I laugh, he shakes his head. “Hand to God.”
“Right hand?”
Kieran throws a potato chip at me. “Moving on. How’s Meret doing?”
“She’s thinking about playing tennis and she’s loving science.”
“So much better than the way I remember fifteen.”
“Which was?”
“Trying to explain to all my teachers why my sister was the one coming to back-to-school night. And actively avoiding gushing about the Jonas Brothers.” He looks at me. “You did a good job, you know. Taking care of a little closeted orphan.”
“Thanks,” I say.
He crosses his legs and begins to tear at the grass. “I know I complain a lot, and I’m sleep-deprived, but I love what I do, Dawn. And I get to do what I love becauseyougave up what you loved, for me.”
“I love my work,” I argue.
“Okay, fair,” he says. “But it wasn’t your original plan.”
I shrug. “Plans change.”
“If Mom hadn’t died, I don’t know if I would have gone to medical school,” Kieran muses.
This is news to me. “Really?”
“I felt so…powerless when it happened. I didn’t want another kid to go through what I did, and I remember thinking that I could become an oncologist. But I got sidetracked by brain tumors.”
“Theyareseductive,” I agree.
“Well, they’re also safer,” Kieran says. “I never look at the patient and think of her.”
We are quiet for a few moments. Kieran finishes his sandwich and tosses the crust to the ducks. “You know what’s weird? I’ve been alive without her longer than I was alive with her, and I still miss her.”
“Yeah.”
“Like—I’ll clip my fingernails and collect them—”
“—in case mice take them and steal your soul,” I finish, laughing.
“Whatisthat superstitious Irish bullshit, anyway?”
“Remember the Christmas she gave you a Swiss Army knife and insisted you pay her back with a penny, because if you didn’t, you’d get into a fight?”
“Or that if you sat in the corner at the table, you’d never get married?” Kieran pauses. “Come to think of it, my seatwasin the corner.”
“She’d be so proud of you,” I tell him.
“You, too.”
I wonder why we always want to have conversations with the people we love when we’ve run out of time. The Egyptians wrote letters to the dead—they’d paint the message on a bowl and leave offerings in it and place it in the tomb. Even if the deceased hadn’t known how to read, it was assumed that in the Netherworld, he or she was literate. A wife might write her husband if her daughter was sick, and she was worried that the girl had been attacked by an aggressivebaspirit. The dead husband could take that spirit to court in the afterlife.
What would I write my mother now, if she could read it?
