Grabbing a cookie from the plastic tray, I sat down and peeled free the center, then handed it to her. Before Lolee, Brynn had eaten the filling. We’d sat beside each other in the kitchen, watching my mother make dinner. Nearly every Tuesday she threw together chicken cacciatore made with bottled spaghetti sauce and too many bell peppers, cooked just long enough that it wouldn’t give us salmonella.
Lolee had long blonde hair she’d bleached white at the ends. It was crunchy and beginning to turn green from repeated dunkings in the public pool. She was all teenage summer smells: fruity lip balm, body spray, and the strong aroma of chlorine. A miniature Brynn, if Brynn were the kind of girl who’d grown up with adults who cared about her. At Lolee’s age, Brynn and I were fucking things up. She was already thinking about leaving by the time she was fourteen, wondering how she could escape, when all the while I was thinking about how to trap her with me forever.
“Ma, you need help?” I asked, not bothering to get up. My mother hated help with anything in the kitchen. She dropped the Pyrex lid on the counter and the clang sounded like a yell.
She brought over a tube of refrigerated crescent rolls and dropped it on the counter. I held one end of the tube while Lolee took the other. She curled back the cardboard while we both pulled. It exploded with a loud pop, and dough oozed from the rift.
“Get the baking sheet,” my mother said, pulling something from the toaster oven. “Damn it, this is already burnt.”
Kneeling on the floor, I pulled out the best tray, flecked rusty brown from years of cooking spray burned onto its surface. Lolee flung the cookie parts at me. I caught very few of them; most slid beneath the fridge until my mother slapped the back of Lolee’s head, then pinched her cheek and rubbed her neck.
Lolee was all odds and ends. Dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts, she’d kicked off her flip-flops and kept nudging at them with her toes. She had the brightness of Brynn and my own jaw set—stark, as if the strong line of muscle had come from biting down and holding back. There was a sharpness to her that revealed itself only in slips. I knew that she wasn’t mine. These parts were Morton by association, the giving up of genetic material from my brother, but I claimed her in my heart. I’d held her to my breast when she was an infant and nuzzled her fuzzy baby head. The starling bird daughter that would never come from my own egg.
I rolled the dough into small triangles and stuffed the tray into the oven alongside the chicken. Beers were in the old fridge out back, and my tired neck felt one calling my name. I left my mother with her cooking and my niece with her cookies and went out to find Milo.
He was propped in my father’s old recliner on the back porch. He’d already cracked open his second beer, the first empty dropped beside his boot on the smooth concrete floor.
“I told her about the lady at the art place. How she gave you a card.” He didn’t look at me while he said it, just peeled the label off his beer. It was coming off in wet hunks which he then scrubbed down onto his dirty jeans. The bits rolled and pilled like molting flesh. It looked like dying might.
“I wish you hadn’t told her that.” Milo was usually the one I could count on for stability, but lately he’d been surprising me. Saying things, making decisions. I didn’t like it.
There were only three beers left, one in the door and the other two jammed between some racks of venison that had definitely gone south. The last time we’d had any fresh meat was when my father had gone out with Andy Reeling from a few streets over and come back carting two big bucks. He’d mounted both heads and priced them over to Andy for BOGO. Said we didn’t need any more heads in our living room, and he was right—already there were multiples mounted on each wall, peering down at guests with their glassy, vacant eyes.
When we were younger, Milo and I had given them the names of the seven dwarfs, plus a few additions we’d come up with: Sleepy was the one with the downcast eyes, Dopey the one with the tongue hanging slightly out and to the left, Happy with the perpetual grin—likely more a grimace of pain—plus Damn and Goddamn for how often our father shouted those words at the television set during Bucs games.
The patio held the relics of furniture past. Our mother’s card table with the vinyl top slashed to bits from where she’d used an X-Acto knife while scrapbooking, the wicker-backed rocking chair that had lost nearly all tension in its seat, and a faded floral love seat ripped to shreds from the scratching of the dogs.
I sat on the edge of the rocking chair and opened the beer with my key-chain bottle opener. Dad’s old one, the relief at the top the shape of a golden bass, mouth jutting open to bite at the cap. It hadn’t been on him when he shot himself, and I was glad for it. Still, as I opened the beer, Milo and I stared at each other and then looked away. I remembered my dad sitting on the back porch with a beer of his own, the bass hanging from his key chain, which always made a lump in his jeans pocket. Remembering soured the beer, made my tongue and teeth hurt. How his hands grasped the fish head, the hissing sound of the air releasing as the cap flung free. Milo and me running around in the yard, watching him drink. I’d wanted to be just like him. Tall, handsome, always unruffled. The kind of person who could take anything you threw at him. The kind of man who could drink a beer in two long pulls and smile afterward, completely satisfied with the life he’d built.
“Remember when Brynn got me that bottle opener to look like Dad’s and it broke the first time I used it?”
Of course I did. I was the one who helped her choose it. We were buying Christmas gifts at the mall and she asked me to pick something out for Milo. You know him better than I do, she’d said, and they’d already been married a year.
“I remember that you tried to superglue it back together.”
“Didn’t want her to know I’d already fucked it up.”
He’d gotten her a necklace with a heart pendant, one of those things men always buy that women would never buy for themselves. She wore it over to my apartment, and when she took off her clothes, she draped it over a dusty lamp in the bedroom. I saw it dangling there the next morning through the bleary eyes of my hangover. The tiny diamond chips twinkled in the sunlight, laughing at me. She’d never asked for it back, and I’d never offered it.
“Guess I fucked up a lot.” Milo’s hands fidgeted on his beer bottle, scraping off more waterlogged paper, rolling the tacky stuff into balls between his fingers.
Brynn was a topic we didn’t discuss. What was there to say? She was gone. She’d left us. I could barely stomach my own memories; I didn’t want to deal with his.
After Brynn, he was less easygoing and more unavailable. Missing even more work, bailing on the kids. A no-show at sports events and dance recitals. Forgetting birthdays. He still smiled all the time, but it wasn’t the kind that reached his eyes. Faux happy, the kind of face I’d construct on an animal I was trying to make docile.
I changed the subject before we got too far into maudlin territory. It was too easy to start him crying. “You think Mom should do it. Go work with that lady.”
One of his shoulders rolled up into a shrug, a nonverbal maybe he’d been perfecting since he was a kid and didn’t want to talk. It was my chance to help fix what was wrong, to ask him questions. Get him to open up. But talking about things was never my specialty. I was the one you came to when you wanted something done. Change your oil, build your back deck, grill your fish. I showed my love by changing tires and jumping batteries. Milo was the one who listened. He always made people feel appreciated and cared for. I’d loved Brynn first, but I’d given her up to him, knowing he’d take better care of her. Someone to tell her all the meaningful, romantic things my mouth couldn’t seem to spew.