The Weight of Him(36)

*

Sheila Russell stood behind her glass desk, all curves and generous breasts. She invited Billy to sit down, indicating the chair opposite. To his relief, this chair had no arms. He sat down and Sheila waited, her lips thin inside her round, pale face, her hair limp and copper. He was so nervous his own lips were tingling and the tops of his fingers had numbed. He launched his prepared speech, telling her about Michael, his sponsored diet, and his phone conversation with the Samaritan volunteer from his local branch. “Everything was going fine until I told her how I was raising the money.”

“I’m not sure I understand her concerns, either. I think what you’re doing is wonderful.”

He had thought he was going to have a fight on his hands and felt almost disappointed.

“I presume you’re doing this under the care of a doctor?” she asked.

“Yes I am.” He felt himself blush at the lie.

“Excellent.”

His hand moved to the soldier in his trousers pocket. “One more thing. I’d like the money I raise to go directly to help young men in trouble, in Michael’s name.”

She hooked her hair behind her ear, its underside more brown than copper. “We don’t normally allot donations by age or gender—”

“But you can?”

“Well, yes, I suppose we could set aside your monies to specifically target—”

“Wonderful, thank you.” He sat trembling with satisfaction, and a growing sense of power. Even his headache had eased.

He told her about the march and asked if she would walk, and give a talk afterward in the hall.

“I could certainly arrange for a local volunteer—”

He shook his head. “It would mean a lot if you could attend. I hope to get a great turnout to this march and really call attention to suicide awareness and prevention. For that, I need to go as big as I can, and you’re going to attract a lot more people than any volunteer.” Sheila opened her mouth to respond, but he pressed on, quivering with adrenaline. “Which brings me to another project I’d love you to participate in, too. I plan to make a film, a documentary that will put a spotlight on the national epidemic suicide has become and call for more preventative action to be taken. It’d be key to get you on board for that, too.”

She laughed. “You don’t do things by halves, do you?”

“Except myself,” he said. She looked confused, and he clapped his stomach with both hands. “Two hundred pounds.”

Her face turned bright red. “Oh, yes, I see.”

At the meeting’s close, she came out from around her desk and shook his hand. He thanked her repeatedly.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

He strode out of her office, feeling tall and broad, solid and strong.

*

In the garage, Billy settled at his workbench. Hardly a workbench, really. More a scarred oak table he’d brought down from his father’s shed how many years back, to do he didn’t know what with. He had taken the table rather than asked, and his father hadn’t seemed to notice its absence. Billy couldn’t remember his reasoning at the time. Maybe it was simply the satisfaction of taking from his father, without getting caught, without blistering blame.

Billy had never used the table, but had always liked how it gave a certain shape to the garage, making it feel more like a work space than dead storage space. He could never see himself actually sitting at the table and working at much of anything. Until now. Now he planned to make a magnificent shrine to Michael. One that would well surpass the bronze sculpture of Michael’s Wellingtons in his father’s shed. He would make a miniature village for the seconds dolls and soldiers—an alternate universe where the tiny version of Michael, and the entire tiny Brennan family, would live and thrive.

Days earlier, he’d cleared the oak table of its stacks of old paid bills, dirty rags, various nails, screwdrivers, and light bulbs. He’d also moved the blue gas lantern that had never worked, and more of the forgotten and broken. He’d reluctantly thrown away the unsalvageable and created space for the rest of the miscellaneous on new wooden shelves he’d made and mounted on the wall, about the only carpentry he’d done since school. Then he’d repainted the stained, gouged tabletop in a rich dark green, as though bringing it back to life.

He opened his metal toolbox, revealing his horde of seconds dolls and soldiers, all arranged in neat rows. The damaged toys seemed to stare, as if waiting for his next move. He removed the first five toys and placed them on the workbench—three soldiers, one with an arm missing, one with a gun missing, and one with an inferior eye, and two dolls, one with a half leg and the other with a single cheek painted bright pink, the other cheek an empty, varnished ivory. The toys were tiny versions of him, Tricia, John, Anna, and Ivor. He added the soldier with no chin strap, reuniting tiny Michael with his tiny family.

Billy moved about the garage, searching among the boxes, bags, bric-a-brac, and old furniture for a wooden, stand-alone easel that had belonged to Michael. Back when Michael was ten or eleven, he had loved to paint. Billy seemed to recall an upside-down rainbow, a spotted alligator with black fangs, and a green owl in a white tree. The phase hadn’t lasted long, Michael’s interests turning instead to music, his studies, the football, and the farm. Billy swallowed hard, remembering how his father used to sit Michael on his lap, even before the boy could walk or talk, and drive him around the farmyard in his red tractor, saying, “You’re a right Brennan. You’re going to be a right good farmer.”