'That was our crib,' I said to Jacob. I pointed toward the crib. 'Dad built it.'
Jacob seemed unimpressed. 'What do I say?' he asked.
'Tell him I invited you two out for drinks tomorrow night, to celebrate Amanda's birth. Tell him I'm buying.'
'What about the money?'
I debated this for a second. 'Tell him I agreed to split it up,' I said, thinking it might lower Lou's guard. 'Tell him we'll get it next weekend.'
Jacob shifted his weight, and the phone wobbled in his lap. He set one of his hands on top of it. 'Have you thought about the farm yet?' he asked.
I stared at him. I didn't want to talk about the farm right now. Mary Beth jumped onto the bed and settled down behind Jacob, right up against his back. He put his head on my pillow.
'Not really,' I said.
'I was kind of hoping you would've made a decision by now.'
He was going to trap me into it, I realized suddenly; he was going to make the farm his price for Lou's betrayal. The teddy bear was lying on the floor beside the bed, and -- to fill the silence that my reluctance to answer created -- I picked it up and wound its key. Its music started to play. The dog lifted his head to watch.
'Jacob,' I said, 'are you blackmailing me?'
He gave me a startled look. 'What do you mean?'
'Are you saying you won't help me unless I promise you the farm?'
He thought about it; then he nodded. 'I guess so.'
The bear sang,
'I do something for you,' Jacob said, 'then you do something for me. That's fair, isn't it?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I suppose that's fair.'
'So you'll help me get it back?'
The bear's music gradually slowed. I waited until it stopped, until the room was absolutely still, and then -- knowing full well that I was making a promise to my brother that I never intended to fulfill -- I nodded.
'I'll do whatever you ask me to,' I said.
AS SARAH and I were putting dinner on the table -- lasagna, garlic bread, and salad -- Jacob excused himself to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was down the front hallway, beneath the stairs, and I followed him with my eyes as he lumbered out of the kitchen. I watched him until he disappeared inside.
'He's going to do it?' Sarah whispered, gesturing with her knife toward the bathroom. We were standing over the table together, Sarah cutting the bread while I poured out two glasses of wine. Sarah was drinking apple juice with her meal; until she finished nursing, she wasn't allowed to have any alcohol.
'We just called,' I said. 'We're picking up Lou tomorrow at seven.'
'Did you listen to their conversation?'
I nodded. 'I sat right next to him.'
'He didn't give him any hints?'
'No. He said exactly what I told him to.'
'And he doesn't mind doing it?'
I hesitated before I answered, and Sarah glanced up at me. 'He made me promise to help him buy back the farm.'
'Your father's farm?'
I nodded.
'I thought we already agreed--'
'He didn't give me a choice, Sarah. It was either that or he wouldn't help us.'
The toilet flushed, and we both looked toward the hallway. 'But you're not really planning on letting him stay, are you?' she asked.
The bathroom door opened, and I turned from her, taking the jug back toward the refrigerator.
'No,' I said, walking away. 'Of course not.'
Amanda was sleeping in the family room, in her Portacrib. Sarah brought her out for Jacob to see before we ate. He didn't seem to know how to act around the baby. He blushed when Sarah made him take her in his arms and held her out, away from his body, as if someone had spilled something on her and he was afraid to get himself dirty. She started to cry a little as soon as he took her into his hands, and Sarah had to soothe her, whisking her quickly back to the family room.
'She's so tiny,' Jacob mumbled, as if he hadn't expected this. That was all he could think to say.
It was a peculiar dinner. At first it appeared that only Sarah would manage to enjoy herself. She looked pretty, alluring, and seemed to know it. Her body was already reclaiming the tightness it had lost in her pregnancy, and though I knew that she must have been exhausted -- the baby had not let her sleep for more than four hours straight since they'd returned from the hospital -- she still looked vibrant, healthy. She rubbed my calf with her foot while we ate.
Jacob, in his shyness around her, focused on his food. He ate rapidly, gorging himself, his forehead breaking out into a sweat. Everything about him hinted at his social discomfort -- he exuded it like a miasma -- and after a while it began to feel contagious. I, too, started having difficulty finding things to say, started overthinking before I responded to his or Sarah's questions, so that my answers came out sounding unnaturally terse and formal, as if I were angry with them and afraid to show it.
It was the wine that saved the evening. Sarah seemed to sense it first: each time Jacob or I emptied a glass, she stood up and refilled it for us. I'm not a drinker -- I've never enjoyed the disinhibiting effect of alcohol, that gradual slipping of self-control -- but tonight it worked exactly as I'd always been told it was meant to, as an anodyne, a lubricant, a builder of bridges. The more I drank, the easier it became for me to talk with Jacob, and the more he drank, the easier it became for him to talk with Sarah.
My inebriation, as it grew, filled me with an unexpected feeling of hope. It was a physical sensation, something warm and liquid that spread outward from my chest -- from my heart, I remember thinking -- to the tips of my fingers and toes. I began to wonder if my brother was not so unreachable as I'd always imagined. Perhaps it was still possible to reclaim him, to invite him into my family and bind him to my heart. He was across the table from me now, saying something to Sarah, almost flirting with her, in fact, but shyly, like a child with a teacher, and at the sight of it I felt a surge of love for the two of them, an overwhelming desire to make things come out right. I would help Jacob buy some land out west, I decided, in Kansas or Missouri; I'd help him set it up just like our father's farm, help him build a replica of the house we'd been raised in, and it would be a place to which Sarah and Amanda and I could return over the years, a respite from our travels across the globe, a surrogate home for us to leave and then come back to, bearing gifts for Jacob and his family.
I watched them talk and laugh with each other, and though I knew I was drunk, sensed it in everything I said and did and thought, I still couldn't help but believe that everything was going to be okay now, that it was all going to work out exactly as we planned.
AS WE were finishing dinner, the baby started to cry. Sarah took her upstairs to nurse while I did the dishes. By the time she returned -- having put Amanda to sleep in her crib -- I'd finished, and Jacob was in the bathroom again.
We'd decided to pass the evening playing Monopoly. Sarah began laying out the board on the kitchen table while I sponged down the counter. I'd stopped drinking toward the end of the meal, and now the wine was settling on me like a heavy cloak, so that everything I did seemed to require more effort than it ought to. I was beginning to think that what I wanted to do was go upstairs and fall asleep.
When I finished with the counter, I went over to the table and sat down. Sarah was dealing out the money. She went in ascending order -- ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties. When she got to the hundreds, she glanced up at me, smiling mischievously.
'You know what we should do?' she asked.
