“We just need to find something else for Mom to do,” I said. “Keep her busy.”
Milo rolled his eyes. “She’s already doing that. It’s not working out so great.”
After Dad killed himself, we’d both talked to her about seeing a therapist. She’d outright refused and hadn’t spoken to either of us for a week. She was offended we’d even asked, as if it were perfectly normal to traipse around in the middle of the night, putting together peep shows in our shop’s front window. I thought about the boar again, sitting lonesome and small in Lucinda’s gallery, and hoped she’d take good care of it. It felt a little like I’d given another woman an ex-girlfriend’s belongings.
“You think we should bring up the therapist again?” I asked. “Maybe that would help.”
“Don’t they have art therapy in counseling centers? Isn’t that a thing?”
“Why does she even need to do art?”
“She likes it. You know she did it in school before she married Dad. Sculpting and shit.” Milo flicked a fat carpenter ant off the arm of the chair. It landed on the floor close to my boot.
“I didn’t know she was that into it.”
Milo snorted and rocked back in his chair. “You don’t know a lot of things about Mom, Jessa.”
It hadn’t felt necessary to learn more about my mother outside of her existence on the periphery of my life. She cleaned our clothes and bought us groceries. Made our meals, mopped and dusted, trimmed the tree. My father was the one I’d admired. He was the one I’d wanted to be like. But then he’d killed himself and left me the letter, and everything I’d thought I knew turned out to be wrong. I had a lot of working theories as to why my father chose me to find him, but the one that kept me up at night was the idea that he knew I was hard inside. That maybe he thought I’d treat him the way I would a deer carcass.
Would I have done that? I wondered. Was there a part of me that could compartmentalize his death, skin him and treat him like just another piece in the shop?
“Even in art therapy they make you talk,” I said. “So she’d have to deal with shit.”
“Maybe you should go to therapy.”
“Fuck you,” I replied, but there was no heat behind it.
I was the one who’d called the police. I’d identified our father’s body in the morgue. In the span of twenty-four hours, I’d seen the father who’d bought me a Publix sub for lunch that afternoon, the dead one covered in blood that night, and the blue-hued body laid out naked under fluorescent lights in the county hospital at six the next morning. My mother had seen none of that. There were times I worried she didn’t really think he was dead, that maybe she just thought he’d left on a fishing trip for a couple of weeks.
“Maybe I can find something for her to do at the shop. Organize shit, or clean up the front.”
Humming, he tipped back in the recliner and drained the last of his beer. He set the empty on the cabinet beside him, one of the relics that had cluttered up my bedroom before being relegated to the back porch. Now it housed our empties, some still half-full, holding drowned cigarette butts and the carcasses of insects.
“We’ll figure it out.” I swapped the bottle from hand to hand, listening to the murmur of voices slipping evenly through the crack in the sliding glass door.
Milo leaned forward again and scrubbed both hands through his hair. The set of his shoulders gave me pause; hunched forward, he looked so much like our father. “About the business. I was thinking we could hire someone else.”
My head ached fiercely, the knots of my braid yanking at my scalp. I wanted to be back in the workshop, focusing all my energy on the hawk I’d been struggling with—looking at the angle of its beak, the movement of the neck, the wings spanned in near flight, almost but not quite catching the breeze. “Milo, come on. You know I can’t.”
“Just a few days a week, part-time work.”
In the backyard, wind scattered yard debris that had accumulated in the months since our father passed. Leaves and grit kicked up against the screen. I stared hard at the old birdbath, cracked and full of brown muck. Sparrows hopped in and out of the detritus, flicking the dirty water delicately off their bodies with brisk shakes.
Milo sat back again, jaw set. “It’s part mine, too. I get some say.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I get some say, damn it.”
We didn’t argue over much, but there was the one thing that continued to hurt my brother, over and over again. The rawboned son with his mother’s pale eyes and sloped shoulders, indicators of his uneasy personality. “When did Bastien get home?”
“Last night. He’s staying in my old room.” Red crept up the bearded shadow of Milo’s neck, cloaking everything like a rash. His embarrassment was feral, an ugly, dirty thing I could nearly taste. “Thought he could stay with Mom for a while. That’s good, right? Another person to keep an eye on her?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s been talking about getting one of those tiny homes they keep showing on television. The ones that are like three hundred feet square. Can fit a whole regular-sized house inside?” Milo smiled and shook his head. “Better than an apartment, he says.”
I bit into the meat of my cheek, worked the flesh over with my molars. Bastien was Brynn’s oldest and had just finished a second stint in rehab. Not related by blood, not to the Mortons, but he looked so much like Brynn that Milo couldn’t help but love him. The last time he’d stayed in town, he’d pawned our mother’s jewelry and written eight hundred bucks’ worth of bad checks.
“He’s better. You can see it in his coloring.” Milo looked at me and I saw that he believed what he was saying. Saw that he needed to feel like it was true, for a while, to make things seem solid again.
Need, my father had written. To need meant to be vulnerable. It was one of the scariest things I could imagine. Needing anything meant you were open to invasion. It meant you had no control of yourself.
“Only if he’s up for grunt work.” I couldn’t say no to my brother. Not when it was Brynn’s kid. “If he fucks up, he’s done. I mean it.”
“Fine.” Milo got up and pulled out another beer for himself. “He’s doing good. Just needs something to keep him busy.”
Behind my brother, a shadow filled the sliding glass. Bastien stood with his long arm cradled around the door, as if holding himself in place. He looked better than the last time I’d seen him. His skin was clear of the scuzz of acne and he’d lost a lot of the sallowness. He wore a clean white T-shirt and some board shorts printed in varied shades of blue, pale palm trees emblazoned over a navy wash of waves. I recognized them as Milo’s clothes.
“Grandma says dinner’s ready.” When he smiled, his teeth were dark, nearly wooden in his mouth. Already his hairline was receding, crawling toward the rear of his skull, as if escaping from the hard look in his eyes. “Got any more of those?” He pointed to the unopened beer cradled in Milo’s palm. “Go good with the chicken.”
“Go get the jug of tea from the fridge, tell Grandma we’ll be there in just a minute.”