Brotherly Love Read Free

hears
his father in the driveway. He knows the sound of the car, the sounds
of all the cars that belong on this street.
    He is sitting at the top of the stairs, his face
pressed into the banister railings. There are other men in the house
now, men who work with his father and have been here before. They
have been coming and going all day. His uncle is sitting at the
dining room table with his mother, his arm all the way around her
back, his thin fingers, patched with hair, cup her far shoulder and
pull her into him.
    Comforting is unnatural to his uncle, but something
holds him in this awkward place. He has seen his father held in this
same way at funerals; he has seen him disappear into words and
manners that were not his.
    He thinks of the thread that held the dog next door.
    His father opens the door, takes a step into the
living room and stops. No one in the room speaks, no one is willing
to meet his eyes.
    His mother covers her face.
    "What is it?" he says.
    The room is quiet, and then the one named Sally
pushes himself off the davenport and touches his father’s arm.
    "Come sit down," he says.
    His father stays where he is, looking around the room
now, as if finding the secret in this place can change it. "Charley,"
the man says, and tugs at his sleeve, a child’s gesture. Peter’s
father follows him to the dining room table, where they both sit
down.
      The man puts a small glass in front of him and
fills it until it spills over the lip.
    "Drink this, and then we talk," he says.
    His father drinks what is in the glass, taking it all
at once, and then returns the glass to the same spot, fitting it into
the half circle it left on the table when he picked it up.
    His mother is crying into her hands; she cannot lift
her eyes to look across the table, and he understands that,
understands the weight.
    "It’s the baby," the man says softly.
    From the staircase, he watches his father. Nothing
seems to change. He stays exactly where he is, staring across the
table. His pulse is in his temple, one of his hands is still wrapped
around the small glass.
    "She got hit with a car," the man says.
    Hearing this, his mother begins crying out loud. His
father does not move. "It wasn’t nobody’s fault," the
man says. "The guy hits some ice and he slid . . ."
    A tear appears suddenly in the corner of his father’s
eye and runs the length of his face, dropping straight and fast, like
sweat on a glass.
    "What guy?" he says.
    One of the men in the living room walks to the dining
room table and stands quietly beside the one who is talking.
    "Victor Kopec," says the one named Sally.
    The boy’s father moves then, turning slowly to look
at the man who has said the name.
    The man nods. "He slid into the yard . . ."
He rubs the back of his neck, looking for the words to say the rest.
"He hit her clean, Charley. She didn’t feel a thing.
Afterwards, his dog, you know, they get excited, but it didn’t make
no difference by then. You can ask the doctors. It wasn’t the dog,
it was the car."
    His father stands up and the man steps in front of
him and shakes his head no.
 
"Ask
your brother if what I’m saying ain’t true."
    His father tries to step around the man, but the man
moves in front, stopping him. His uncle’s arm moves in a slow arc
over Peter’s mother; he pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
His face is pale in the kitchen light, and the pockmarks deepen at
the movement, throwing a shadow across his face.
    "Charley," he says, "it was his fault,
he’d be dead. I’ve got a kid, I’d done it myself .... "
    Peter’s father doesn’t seem to hear him. He puts
his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him, almost gently,
and moves him out of the way. The other man——the one who walked
in from the living room——grabs him from behind, hugging him
around the waist.
    The man holds him, then they are all holding him.
Peter’s uncle has the feet. His father turns left and right,
kicking, and his strength moves