“Great-grandpa,” Charles repeated, somewhat idiotically. The word felt foolish in his mouth. They’d never called Charlie Bates Great-grandpa, had they? He’d died before they were born; he was too unknown to them to have a nickname. At the same time, Charles knew him so well. Charlie Bates loomed over this house, his picture in almost all of the rooms. He was part of every conversation they had. Who they were supposed to be. Who they weren’t. The differences between them.
Suddenly, Charles was unclear about the history he shared with his brother. It all felt jumbled in his head, some of it fact, some of it twisted, opportunistic fiction. He felt so unsure about everyone in his life, too, so heavy with what he now knew about Bronwyn. He needed to get out of this room.
“Anyway,” Charles said, letting out a held breath and ducking into the garage.
The room was dark and smelled like oil. He flicked the light on next to the door. There was his father’s BMW, silent and shiny. Behind it were cans of paint, shelves of tools, a band saw, some shovels. He spied something folded up in the corner. Charles walked over to it and pulled it out from the cobwebs. It really was the same tent from all those years ago; he remembered the yellow posts.
He bent down and looked at the other shelves. The aluminum staking poles were also there, all tied together with a big purple rubber band meant for vegetables. The carabiners, which locked the posts together, were on the floor underneath the shelf. His father, anal to the end, had even saved the instruction booklet; it was nestled in a ziplock nearby.
Charles gathered everything up and started to carry it to the backyard. It took a few trips. Once there, he laid it all out on a flat piece of grass: the posts, the carabiners, the tent with its exoskeleton, and the vinyl subfloor. He spread the tent out, assembled the poles, and started to stake them, just as the instructions said. When he had all four poles staked, he raised them up so the tent stood and pulled the carabiners around the poles to secure them. Sometimes the instructions didn’t make sense, and he had to study the figures for a long time before he understood how to attach all the carabiners and posts together in such a way so that the tent would stand on its own, tight and secure. It took him a long time, probably far longer than it had taken his father, but doing it alone, doing it with no one watching, he felt able to make mistakes.
He heard a door slam and jumped. Scott was standing on the back porch, chewing on what looked like a hunk of bread pulled raggedly from a loaf. He carried a backpack over one shoulder. “You mind moving some of the poles?” he said. “They’re blocking my car.”
“Oh.” Charles dropped the tarp and walked toward the driveway.
Scott looked at the tent somewhat blandly, as if he wasn’t surprised that Charles was building it. “Do you want any help?”
“That’s okay,” Charles said, dragging the poles to the grass. And then he waited for Scott to make fun of what he was doing. Scott just kept chewing. He didn’t move.
“Yeah, I guess you got it almost up,” his brother remarked after a while. “Better than Dad, anyway. He couldn’t build for shit.”
One of the rods slipped from Charles’s hands. “What do you mean?”
Scott stuffed another piece of bread in his mouth. “Dad was pathetic. Acted like he knew what the hell he was doing. He would never admit when something didn’t make sense. He was hopeless, though.”
“Dad could build things,” Charles said weakly. Couldn’t he?
Scott fiddled with the strap on his bag, looking fraught, like he wanted to say something else. All kinds of possibilities crashed through Charles’s mind. A confession about this kid that died. An indication of what he knew about Bronwyn and their father. Maybe he wanted to surge at Charles, hitting him again for what Charles had said years ago. Because even if Bronwyn was right, even if it didn’t change him, what Charles said was still the worst thing Charles had ever said to anyone, the worst thing he had ever done.
Charles glanced at the garden, where the old rose trellises had once been, the ones Scott had burned down. As Scott struck the match, he’d looked at Charles with such authority and confidence. He didn’t care who his adoptive parents were or what their legacy was. He was in control of his destiny, freer and richer than Charles had ever been.
“Joanna,” Scott said. He spun the key around his finger. “Don’t fuck that up, man. Okay?”
“Okay …” Charles sounded out, baffled.
Scott nodded, seemingly satisfied, and walked to his car, opened his passenger door, and threw his bag inside. “Well, I’m off,” he said.
“Off where?”
Scott just grinned. He walked around the car and got in the driver’s seat. The car growled to life, the stereo’s thunderous bass buzzing.
“Wait,” Charles called just as his brother began to back up.
Scott braked, turned down the stereo, and stuck his head out the window.
“I’m sorry,” Charles said.
“For what?”
There was a lump the size of a golf ball in Charles’s throat, a spicy taste on his tongue. “For … the poles,” he managed to say. “For blocking your way.”
Scott’s expression wavered for a moment, as if he’d decoded what Charles really meant. As if they were, for at least a moment, really brothers. “You’re cool,” he said.
And then he turned up the music again and rolled up the window. The headlights snapped on. Charles shaded his eyes, watching as Scott slung one arm over the back of the passenger seat and maneuvered the wheel so that the car pivoted down the driveway. He backed out the whole way down, navigating the curves through the back dash, something Charles had never been able to do. And then he was gone.
Charles stood still for a few minutes, his ear cocked. Scott’s engine growled and sputtered the whole way down the road, and Charles was certain he could still hear it even a few miles away. The sound felt imprinted inside him, the same way a bright orange shimmer lingered on his corneas after staring too long at the sun.
Then he turned back to work on the tent. When it finally stood, he stepped back. There it was, a big yellow teepee with a flap for an entrance. He had built it. The wind blew; the tent fluttered but didn’t fall.
He ducked down and climbed through the small opening. Once inside, he zipped up the flap, closing himself in. Everything in here looked yellow, from his skin to his fingernails to the face of his watch. He could hear traffic on the street down the hill. When he moved, the mesh beneath him swished. There was a tiny flap in the ceiling that could be unzipped, probably for stargazing. He lay back, putting his arms behind his head, feeling the brittle grass through the thin subfloor. When he looked into the corner, he saw something written on the canvas. J.M. James McAllister. His father liked to put his initials on everything.
A sob welled up inside him, coming from somewhere very deep. It got stuck in his throat and then burst out his nose. He turned his head to the side and shook.
He sobbed for a while until he wasn’t even sure anymore what he was crying about. He was simply too exhausted to keep this up anymore, to pretend that things were fine. Realizing this made him feel fresh, like he’d just stepped out of a shower. There. He was still breathing. His heart was still pumping. The world hadn’t ended just because he’d admitted that he wasn’t fine, he wasn’t fine at all.
He raised his head, realizing something about what Bronwyn had said. Scott had seen their father and Bronwyn hugging a week or so before the banquet, and he’d assumed the worst. At the party, Scott stopped at their table, but Bronwyn went inside first, presumably to talk to his father and explain that they couldn’t be friends anymore. Scott followed—why? To intervene?—but Charles interrupted him, venting years of frustration. Scott took Charles’s abuse, but for a moment, Charles remembered his brother’s eyes dimming, noticing something behind them. All this time, Charles hadn’t known what he was looking at, but Scott had seen them, his father and Bronwyn. Instead of letting it play out, instead of letting Charles see, Scott had tackled Charles, diverting his attention. Maybe he didn’t want Charles’s opinion of his father ruined forever. Maybe Scott wanted to protect their father, or Charles, or even their mother, by creating a subterfuge. What if it hadn’t been some random act of violence but a noble gesture, a protective measure?
“No,” Charles said out loud, his voice hollow and loud inside the little tent. That was bullshit. He didn’t want to consider that Scott was actually … perceptive. It was so much more satisfying to dwell on Scott jumping him, throwing him to the ground in revenge.
He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. “Right,” he said gruffly to himself, imagining that his brother was still here, that he’d climbed into the tent with him. “Nice try. Big noble explanation, twelve years in the making.”
Believe what you want, his brother answered. It’s not like I’m looking for thanks or anything. But it wasn’t Scott’s normal tone of voice, all biting and sarcastic. He sounded deflated, maybe even sad, just as he’d sounded when he told Charles not to fuck it up with Joanna just now. Charles crossed his arms over his chest, feeling something inside him start to crack. A ball-shaped lump was stuck halfway down his windpipe, hard and immobile.
“He was kind of an asshole to me,” Charles mumbled aloud.
And what would Scott say? I know? Would he smile? Laugh? Or would he look as miserable as Charles felt? It’s not like we had a very decent relationship, either, he’d maybe say. It’s not like he ever talked to me really. Not like how he talked to her.
Scott’s voice was so real, the words so credible. It was as though he and his brother had really had this conversation once, maybe when very drunk or very sleepy. But when could that have been? When had they really talked? And yet Charles could picture the conversation playing out exactly like this, which made him wonder if these weren’t things he’d already known, deep down, without Scott ever having to tell him.
The wind shivered in the trees, sweeping right into the tent. Charles rolled over and felt something in his pocket. His phone. He pulled it out and stared at it, turning it on. The screen bleated with life. He’d turned it off when he went into the house, but now his screen said he had three new messages.
He wondered if at least one of them was from Fischer, inquiring if he’d completed the interview. Maybe Back to the Land had already called and told them he hadn’t, that he’d screeched away from the cabin after only a few minutes of talking to Bronwyn. He listened to the first one. At first, it was just dead noise, the sound of an ambulance. Joanna, probably. She often did this, called him, got his voice mail, and then didn’t bother to listen for when the beep came. “Charles?” she said after a moment, and then hung up.
He smiled, daring to be hopeful. He thought about the way Joanna had kissed him on the mouth in that bar two years ago. He thought about the little notebook she kept by her computer entitled Words I Like. Inside were a list of words like anathema, thistle, erstwhile, written down for no other reason except that she thought they were pretty. He thought of her smooth body lying in the Jamaican sun, and he thought of the worry dolls she’d bought on a college trip to Guatemala. She’d had them lined up on the windowsill of her old apartment, the one she’d lived in when he met her. What had happened to those dolls? She must have had at least fifty, all of them different, but he hadn’t seen them in ages. He kind of missed them.