It seemed crazy to me to have a lake house but no means to enjoy the lake except through the window. But my brother knew what he liked, so I didn’t push the issue with him. “Okay.” I scratched my scruff. “I think next week, I’m going to start on the interior before I work on the exterior of my cabin. So, I can help you with yours in the morning, before it’s hot as fuck. And then work inside mine starting around noon.”
“That works for me. I’m an early riser.”
“I know.” And so did our mom, who’d taken to waking up an hour earlier than normal to offer him breakfast—which most of the time he declined. “Mom packed us a lunch, by the way, so we don’t have to rush back to town.”
Asa laughed, but the humor wasn’t really there. “Of course she did.”
We may have been brothers, but I didn’t like him laughing about our mom. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re her precious baby. I’m not surprised she made you a spread.”
“Us a spread,” I corrected. “You were her first baby. Don’t be a dick.”
Asa held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not being a dick. I’m just making a comment.”
“And what comment is that?” I turned, not really giving a shit what he was going to say as I headed for my truck, where the cooler was waiting.
“That you’re a mama’s boy. I find it hard to believe that you’re actually going to live out here, even part-time.”
I paused with my hand on the handle of the cooler. It took everything in me not to turn around and say what I wanted, which was—in no particular order:
I’m only a mama’s boy because her original mama’s boy isn’t the same.
You hurt her all the time when you ignore her, even when it’s not your fault.
When you push her love away, someone has to be there to make up for it.
You’re breaking her heart and you don’t even see it yourself.
It wasn’t fair to him, though, and would only cause more tension between us. He couldn’t help his brain injury, and I genuinely believed he was often unaware of the affect his indifference had on our mother. I’d doubled down on being a mama’s boy the first time I’d walked by her bedroom and heard her crying in her bathroom, after Asa had blown off her efforts for dinner. The psychologist had explained it all to us in very plain terms, but I think my mom secretly hoped that once he was back home in familiar territory, he’d be the same little boy she raised.
And he wasn’t. I could mourn the brother I’d lost, but he was still there. That’s why we were doing this whole neighboring cabin project. Maybe after a summer of doing something that would very likely test both of our patience, we’d find common ground as brothers again.
Unfortunately, that meant taking us further from our mom. So, I would do what I could in the meantime, to give her the meaning she found in mothering us even as we were adults.
“PB and J or cold cuts?” I asked him as I sorted through the sandwiches—all six of them.
“PB.”
I tossed the wrapped sandwich his way and a water, too. We sat on the tailgate in the sunshine, eating our lunch in silence.
It was strange to be up here without my grandfather. I would be forever grateful that he’d chosen to bestow this land upon me and my brother after he passed, but it would always be Gramps’s cabin. Even after I replaced some siding and installed some new sheetrock inside. Even when the appliances were all newer and the floors were stained a color that they’d never been in his heyday, they’d still be Gramps’s.
“Inspector comes Friday,” Asa said, interrupting my thoughts.
“I know,” I told him around a mouthful of turkey and cheese. “We discussed this.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Yeah, just a few minutes ago.”
Asa shook his head. “No. I only got the email this morning.” He wasn’t angry, but he was defiant in his belief that we hadn’t discussed this.
I swallowed, opened my mouth to argue, and stopped. This was one of the things his doctor had explained to us. He was experiencing short-term memory loss as a result of his injury, but this was the first time I’d actively noticed it in a conversation.
“What are you going to do about the landscaping?” I asked, picking the crust off my bread and tossing it toward a few birds that had collected nearby.
“I’m not sure. But I need to figure that out before I have the walkway poured going up to the house. I should probably go look at trees and shrubs later.”
“Probably.” The sandwich went down like a lump.
“I have to order the fencing too.”
“Yep.” I took a long pull of my water, knowing we’d already had this conversation and not sure I wanted to continue it. It was a reminder that not all battle scars were visible to the naked eye. I didn’t know how to navigate conversations with my brother anymore. Was it better to engage, to act like we hadn’t discussed it already? What if he forgot again a few minutes later and repeated himself? Would we be stuck on this endless loop? “Where are you going to put the fence?” I asked.
“Along the front. That’s why I need to figure out the walkway, too. So, I know how much fencing to order. And then I have to get ahold of someone to pave more road.”
“Where are you going to put the mailbox?” I asked. Maybe this was one way to break the loop, to deepen a conversation we’d already had. Though mailboxes weren’t exactly on the same emotional level as, say, the meaning of life.
“Probably right next to yours. We should put them in concrete, by the way. With summer coming, kids might come around and take bats to them like they did a few years ago. Little shits.”
“Not a bad idea. We used to be those little shits,” I reminded him.
He was quiet for a moment and when I looked at his face, I could see him trying to make out the memory.
“Remember, in the back of that old purple Ford? It belonged to that one guy, with the unusual spelling of Cody.”
Asa’s lips moved like he was sounding out the name Cody. “C-O-T-E?” he asked, like this was a spelling test.
I blew out a relieved breath. “Yeah. Cote.” Thank fuck he got that. We spent damn near every single summer with the kid growing up, until he’d gone off to some posh school on the east coast and his parents had sold their lake house.
“His eyes were blue.”
“Yeah, they were.”
“He pushed you off the dock when you were ten. You hit your head on a rock.”
The relief in my gut grew so that it nearly swamped me. “He did. And you—”
“—told him in front of his friends that he was hung like a mouse.”
We both cracked up laughing at that. “And then you jumped in and pushed my ass back up onto the dock. And made me spend the rest of the summer grappling with you so that Cote couldn’t do it again.”
“He had fifty pounds on you. You were scrawny.”
I flexed my left bicep. “Not anymore. And I’ve probably got fifty pounds and four inches on you now.”
“Yeah, well, spend three months in and out of hospitals and you’d lose weight too.”