The Silent Sister(4)

“I stopped by right after Daddy died,” I said, “but I couldn’t find you.”

“And that surprised you?”

Okay, I thought. The angry Danny today.

I held up the bags. “I brought you some food and cigarettes.” I’d bought some fruit for him—peaches and a melon and a pint of strawberries—but one whole bag was filled with the boxed macaroni and cheese he loved along with the Marlboros. I long ago gave up trying to make my brother into a healthy eater. Making him happy was more important to me. I’d stopped short at buying him booze. I was sure he had plenty of that already.

I reached up to hand him the bags and he took them from me, stepping back to let me in. As always, I yearned to reach out and hug him as I climbed into the trailer, but sometime over the years, our hugging had stopped. He was four years older than me, and until I was ten or eleven, I would have called him my best friend. That’s when adolescence seemed to take hold of him and refused to let go.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Do we have to?” he asked in a way that told me he knew perfectly well we had plenty to talk about.

“Yes, we have to.” It had been months since I’d been in his trailer and I’d forgotten how it listed to one side, giving me vertigo as I walked into the tiny space. His narrow bed was at one end, the built-in table and benches at the other, and they were no more than five steps apart. I knew he liked the confined space. He once told me he felt safe, contained that way. He was not a complete hermit, though. More than once, I’d come to the trailer to find signs that a woman had been there—lipstick on a coffee cup or a romance novel on the counter. You couldn’t look like my brother without turning heads. My girlfriends used to drool over him when we were teenagers. I liked knowing he occasionally had company out here.

The window air conditioner cranked out a weak flow of cool air as I began putting away the groceries. I’d never really understood how he had power out here at all, but he’d somehow managed to rig up a generator that kept him cool enough in the summer and warm enough in the winter. The generator also kept his computer running. The laptop on the table was the one truly out-of-place item in the old trailer, which otherwise looked like it came straight out of the fifties. Danny had always been a technology geek. He was glued to that laptop by the fingertips, and I was glad, actually. He kept in touch with some of the guys he’d served with through e-mail, and I thought he needed that camaraderie. I only wished he’d keep in touch with me as well as he did with them. Sometimes I felt as though my e-mails to him went into a vacuum.

I put the milk in his refrigerator while he leaned against the counter, watching me.

“Bryan with you?” he asked.

“We broke up.” I shut the refrigerator door. “It was my doing,” I added.

“I thought you said he was ‘the one.’”

I was surprised he remembered me saying that. “Well, I thought he was,” I said. “But he’s been separated from his wife for three years and he still wasn’t doing anything about a divorce and I got tired of waiting.” I was certain Bryan loved me, but as a couple, we were going nowhere. He had two great kids and I knew he still cared about his wife. I had the feeling I was in the way. “The writing was on the wall,” I said. “It just took me a long time to see it.”

“Good for you.” Danny sounded sincere.

“I thought you liked him.”

“I didn’t like how he was stringing you along.” Folding his arms, he leaned back and took a good look at my face. “And you know what?” he asked. “You look great. Like you got rid of a burden that’s been weighing you down.”

“Oh, right.” I laughed. How could I look great when I felt so miserable? I was touched, though. Under his surly and sometimes caustic exterior, my brother was still a sweetheart.

He pulled a box of cigarettes from the carton I’d bought him, opened it, and lit one. He held the box out to offer me one, as though I might have started smoking since I last saw him. I shook my head as I slid onto one of the bench seats at the table.

His shotgun was directly in my line of view, propped against the wall next to the counter. He hunted small game in the woods and, as far as I knew, the shotgun was his only weapon. I hoped that was the case. Harry Washington told me that everyone in the police department saw Danny as a “loose cannon.” Harry had served with Danny in Iraq and I knew he kept a protective eye on him. He’d e-mailed me a few weeks ago to tell me Danny’d been permanently banned from his favorite sports bar for getting in a fight with the bartender. He now hung out at Slick Alley, Harry said, a run-down-looking pool hall that gave me the creeps every time I drove past it.

My gaze lit on that shotgun again. I’d seen my brother’s sudden bursts of anger firsthand, but I wasn’t nearly as afraid of him using his gun against another person as I was of him using it against himself. Although the shattered leg he’d suffered in Iraq had taken a toll, his psychological injuries were far worse. To be fair, though, he hadn’t been in the greatest shape before he went.

“How are you?” I looked up at him.

He took a drag of his cigarette, nodding. “Good,” he said through a stream of smoke. Sitting down across from me at the table, he moved his laptop aside and tapped an ash into a jar lid.