Flying Solo(11)

“Your brain is fine,” Patrick said. “You’ve been doing well, right?”

“I have,” Scott said. “By the way, Laur, speaking of mental states, it looks like you’re going to be up here to celebrate the big four-oh. Are you ready for that?”

She frowned. “I’m trying not to think about it. I have enough to worry about. I have to tell you, I’m sure it’s much worse with babies, but I never knew how much work it was just owning a house. My furnace went out a couple weeks ago, and it took some time for me to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t just call the landlord and tell them to come fix it. That I was the landlord. It was like a horror movie. I might have screamed.”

“Wait until something breaks that pours water all over your floor,” Patrick said.

Laurie put her fingers in her ears. “La la la la I’m not listening.” She relaxed deeper into the couch. “I did get somebody to come in and clean once a month, but I don’t know if I’m going to keep up with that.”

“Why’s that?” Ryan was chewing on a handful of leftover Chex mix from the memorial service. When Laurie squinted at him, he shrugged. “I took some in a baggie. They said I could.”

Laurie shook her head. “Anyway. A couple of weeks ago after she cleaned, I get back to the house, and there’s this neat pile on the armchair in the corner, and it’s three of my bras. It was kind of alarming, but then I realized she found them in the couch. And I’m just not ready for a stranger to know I take my bra off in the living room at the end of the day without standing up. I think it’s too intimate.”

“She probably doesn’t think that. She probably just thinks you have sex on your couch a lot.”

“That’s not better,” Laurie said. “Then she’s just thinking I have a sex couch, while the whole time it’s actually just me being lazy and not wanting to stand up.”

“So,” Joey said, “it’s about a stranger seeing your underwear.”

“Oh, this isn’t about the bras,” Ryan interjected, swallowing another mouthful of Chex mix. “This is just like when we weren’t allowed in your room. Do you remember when you used to put Scotch tape over the edge of your door so you could tell if anybody went in there while you were gone?”

“Oh, I remember that,” Scott said. “You had that sign, KEEP OUT I MEAN IT. And Mom made you take it down and replace it with one that said KEEP OUT PLEASE.”

Laurie had made the sign when she was thirteen. She had come back home before dinner after spending a day watching MTV with June, and she’d seen that her desk drawer was open. She had stomped into the room that Ryan and Joey shared, because they were responsible for 90 percent of the snooping, given that Patrick and Scott were older and wouldn’t ever admit they were the slightest bit curious about her or her stuff. She flung the door open hard enough that the knob crashed into the wall, and found them on the floor building a complicated Lego set. “Who was in my room?” she snarled, her cheeks still pink from riding her bike home. After several minutes of interrogation, Ryan had admitted that he went in hunting for a pair of scissors for some project or other.

It wasn’t a particularly bad example of an intrusion into her personal space; he hadn’t read her diary. That had happened later, when she was fourteen; Joey was grounded for a month. Laurie had established years ago that he no longer remembered doing this, even though she still thought about it every time she started a new journal. But at the time, she had felt her face go hot, and she’d yelled at the boys with such fury that her mother had come flying up the stairs to intervene. Laurie had felt the pressure building in her head, the heat on the back of her neck. They will not stay out, she had said. I ask and they ignore me and they think they can come in and open anything they want. She had ended up at Dot’s for dinner.

The next day, her mother had agreed that it wouldn’t hurt anything for her to put a sign up on the door of her room to “remind” them. And after Laurie drew it with markers, her mom insisted on only the one edit.

“Man, it’s a good thing you didn’t get married,” Scott said. Everybody was very quiet. Ryan looked at Laurie. Joey looked at Patrick. “What?” Scott added. “It’s true. I mean, I don’t think you could have kept Chris out of your laundry forever.”

“You know what you are?” Patrick said, looking at her over his glasses. “You’re exacting. You always were, and you probably always will be. You want a thing how you want it, you want it left where you put it, and you don’t want everybody’s hands all over it.”

Laurie shrugged. “Maybe I’m a hummingbird.”

“What does that mean?” Ryan asked. “Is this a nature thing? Do I have to watch PBS to understand?”

“Most birds fly in big flocks,” Laurie said. “They’re social. But some hang out by themselves. Like hummingbirds. They mostly just do their own thing unless they’re eating or making baby birds, and maybe I’m that. Living a hummingbird life.”

For a minute, all her brothers seemed to be digesting this idea, but soon, Patrick scoffed noisily. “Eh, I still say you should have married Angus. What happened to Angus?”

Angus was the boyfriend before Chris. He was a hiking guide, and he worked at an outdoorsy store that earned him discounts on backpacks and boots. He shared Laurie’s love of turning over rocks to look at critters. He had a big bushy beard, and a couple of times a year, he played guitar in a Fleetwood Mac cover band. He’d been part of the boys’ group chat for two NFL seasons and then vanished from her life and, she assumed, theirs.