Ask Him Why Read Free

do dishes. And I guess the dishes had gotten all mixed up in my mind with the rolling-off of stress, so they were my friends, those soapy dishes.
    After a while, Joseph came into the kitchen and leaned on the counter between the toaster and the espresso machine. His elbow was maybe five inches from mine, but he didn’t look at me. He looked over the sink and out the kitchen window, and I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to be with me or just didn’t want to be with the rest of them.
    I stopped washing. Moving. For a minute, I had to remind myself to breathe.
    “Hey, Duck,” he said.
    I looked at the blond hair on his arm. It was hard to look at his face, his head, because it was so weird to see his hair military-short. Some people can pull off that look, but this was my brother Joseph. It made him look like some alien had come down to Earth as a Joseph impersonator. Not only would he never voluntarily do that to his hair, it was hard to imagine he would ever go someplace where anyone would force it on him.
    At least, the Joseph I’d always known.
    I wanted to ask him, What the hell happened? Because there was a hole in the room the size and shape of that unbelievably obvious question, and I couldn’t bear to leave it gaping open another second. But that would have been something like direct communication. I didn’t have a lot of talent in that field at the time, probably because I had no experience and no real role models.
    So what I said was, “Why did you take a cab? From the . . . I don’t know. Airport or bus. Or train or whatever. Why a cab?”
    He still didn’t look at me. He said, to the window, “Uh . . . to get home?”
    “Why not call Mom?”
    “I did.”
    “She wouldn’t come?”
    “She was in the middle of her book group. The ladies who lunch were here.”
    “But this . . . I mean . . . it just seems kind of big.”
    “It was her turn to host. You know how she feels about social responsibility.”
    That was a private joke between us. When most people use that term, they mean some kind of progressive societal awareness. Joseph used it with our mom as a way of suggesting that her number- one priority is looking good in front of the ladies in her social circle.
    “Still,” I said, unsure how to finish making my point, and also vaguely aware that I shouldn’t need to.
    “Duck,” he said, “it’s Janet.”
    He’d been calling our mom “Janet” since he was eighteen. He’d been calling me “Duck” since I was a baby, and nobody remembered where it came from. Lots of people have nicknames that they earned somehow as babies, but there’s always a family story about why. So I think it says a lot that nobody bothered to remember, like our family history was never worth recording.
    “Joseph, what happened?” I asked, surprising myself. Surprising us both, I think.
    A long pause.
    “Something not very cut-and-dried,” he said. Then he paused again. “Something people won’t quite be sure what to make of. And so now you’ll get to watch people turn themselves inside out to try to make it into something very simple. Very black and white.”
    I wanted to ask him what that meant. Also why people would do that. But my first question seemed a little nosy, even to me. He’d obviously already told me as much as he wanted to tell.
    People think if somebody’s in your blood family, then you know them well enough to ask anything, but some families know each other better than others. We were mostly boundaries, with not a lot of permission to cross. Approaches were always handled with great caution, and the applications to do so took an abnormally long time to process.
    As to the second question, well . . . it’s one thing to know what you think people will do next. It’s another to know why anybody does anything. It’s always easier to know the “what” than the “why.”
    “I missed you, Duck,” Joseph said.
    It was such a rare blast of affection from anyone in the house that it