"Andrew."
"Andrew. Whose mother cut his hair with a bowl."
"You're being mean."
"I'm being honest. Look at the upgrade."
I felt the smile come up at the corner of my mouth before I had decided to let it.
"He's not an upgrade right now."
"Talk to him tomorrow. Not tonight. Not in this. You both need to come to it without the heat in your hands. Promise me you'll wait."
"I promise."
He gave me the small smile he had been giving me since he was ten. One corner up. The chip in his tooth showing through.
He paid at the front. The owner waved off a tip and Jacob slid one onto the counter anyway because he had been raised by my mother's sister. I helped him into the wool overcoat. I held the door.
The rain had gone light. The street outside was the kind of wet that beaded on the wool of his coat and sat there without soaking through. I walked him to the corner. I lifted my arm at the first cab that came down the avenue. The cab pulled to the curb. He took my hand at the door and squeezed once, the way he had squeezed at the airport the morning he had flown out, and he ducked into the cab and the cab pulled away from the curb and went down the avenue toward the bridge.
I watched the brake lights until the brake lights turned.
I walked three blocks to the bus.
I sat by the window. The bus pulled away from the curb. I watched a city slide past the glass I was not really seeing, a man at a hot dog cart, a woman in a wool hat at a phone, a boy on a skateboard at a light. My phone was in my pocket. It did not buzz. He was doing what I had told him to do. The pouch was in my coat pocket against my hip, and the small gold bar inside the pouch was warming to the heat of me.
9
DANIIL
The den off the main hall had a way of going gold in the late part of the afternoon, the tall windows pulling the last of the light in across the rug and laying it in long slats over the low table and over my knee and over the bottle that had been new on the table this morning and was two thirds of the way down to its label now. I had not turned a lamp on. I had not been hungry. The television was on a soccer match I had not chosen, the sound muted, the green of the pitch the only color in the room that was moving, and I had been sitting on this couch for the better part of three hours in a shirt I had also been sitting in yesterday.
My hair was wrong. I had put a hand through it too many times. I had not shaved.
The phone was face down on the cushion beside my thigh.
She had called four times in three days. I had watched the screen light each time and I had let the screen go dark again. I had not picked up. I had not written back. I had sat with my glass empty and my hand on the glass and I had told myself, three days running, that I was the wrong man to put a hand on a phone right now.
I am not angry with her. I am afraid of myself.
That was the thing I could not say out loud yet. I could not trust my own hands tonight. I had felt the print of her arm under my fingers for three days and I could feel it now if I closed my eyes, and the woman who would have to live with those hands was the one calling. So I had let her call.
I poured. The bottle went lighter at the neck. I drank. The Stoli did what Stoli does, which is to go down a clean road and put a clean floor under everything that has been falling. I set the glass back. I did not feel any better. I had not felt better at any point in three days. I had only felt slower, and slower was not the thing I had been chasing. I had been chasing quiet.
The door of the den opened.
My brother did not knock at my door. He never had. He came into the room the way he came into every room he had ever entered after me, which was without asking, and he sat down on the couch beside me without saying a word. He picked up the bottle by the neck and held it up to the light and looked at the level of it the way a man looks at a fuel gauge on a long road. He set it back down on the wood.
He had the Glock at the small of his back. I could see the line of it under his jacket when he sat. He always carried at the compound. He had always carried.
"What is your problem?"
I let the question sit for a beat. I looked at the muted pitch on the screen. I looked at my hands.
"Is it that obvious?"
"I know what you look like when you are running. I am your brother."
