At our parents’ funeral, I sat in the front pew with Uncle Gavin and Fay on one side of me, Susannah on the other, and I remember that even in the fog of my grief, I realized Susannah was just staring at the floor the entire service—glaring at it, really, as if concentrating all her anger onto it. She had refused to sit next to Fay, refused to receive mourners at the reception even though she could sit in a chair because of her injuries. And I remember being vaguely pissed off about it but just writing her behavior off as another example of Susannah being an angry bitch. I’d been wrapped up in my own misery and hadn’t left room to think about my sister. Surrounded by mourners, many of whom spoke words of kindness and sympathy—your mother was so wonderful, she’s in a better place, your father is still watching over you—I remember feeling utterly alone. I hadn’t even considered what Susannah might be feeling, how her grief might look very different from mine.
I’m sufficiently stunned by all of this that I don’t say anything for a while, and Susannah and I sit in silence, not even registering the TV anymore.
“It wasn’t very adventurous,” I finally say. Susannah turns her head slowly and raises an eyebrow. “Me and Frankie,” I say. “That summer. Mostly we just hand-delivered envelopes to people.”
Susannah doesn’t say anything for a minute, then decides to accept my comment for the half-assed olive branch that it is. “What people?” she asks.
“All kinds,” I say. “I remember the first one was Johnny Shaw.”
“Uncle Gavin’s lawyer?”
I nod. “Had this goon in his office, big guy with a shaved head and no neck, wore a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. Tried to scare us.”
“Did it work?”
“He wanted to know our names, so I told him mine was Ernest Hemingway. He said, ‘Okay, Mr. Hemingway, you can just leave that envelope with me.’”
Susannah laughs now, bright and startling in the customer lounge. The three kids watching Mama Bone jerk their heads to look at Susannah before slowly returning their gaze to the TV. A man peering at a magazine looks over at us, then goes back to reading. I don’t care. It feels good to make Susannah laugh.
“Okay, so what else did you and Frankie do?” she asks.
“That’s pretty much it: delivered stuff to people. A diner on Crescent, sometimes. A shoe store in Underground. Once a lady working at the passport service desk in the post office.”
“Blank passports, I bet,” she says. “So, when did you figure it out?”
“About the blank passports?”
“That Uncle Gavin is what he is.”
I pretend to think about her question. I’m really stalling. This isn’t a conversation I’ve ever had, with anyone. My walls are going up, portcullises dropping, searchlights sweeping back and forth over barbed wire. At the same time, though, I feel … relief, I guess. A potential unburdening. I’ve carried around my uncle’s secrets—some of them, anyway; not all of them, never all—for years, like a heavy pack I’ve gotten used to and would only notice when I shed its weight off my back.
“That first summer,” I say.
Susannah makes a dismissive pff. “I guessed that. You’re slow, not stupid.”
“Thanks?”
“Seriously, what made you figure it out?”
All the deliveries, I want to say. Me and Frankie being Uncle Gavin’s messenger boys. But that wasn’t it, not really.
“Brandon Cargill,” I say to her.
Her eyes widen with understanding. “I know who he is. He would come by Ronan’s after—” She hesitates for only a second. “After you left, for college. What happened with him?”
Part of me wants to acknowledge that pause of hers, all the unsaid things loaded into that brief moment. Another part of me wishes I had a drink—a cold beer, maybe a double bourbon. Instead I sigh, and then I tell her.
BRANDON CARGILL WORKED out of a garage west of downtown, in an industrial strip sandwiched between the interstate on one side and the neighborhoods of English Avenue and Vine City on the other. Low brick buildings and warehouses alternated with patches of scrubby fields bordered by rusting chain-link fences, the downtown skyscrapers rising on the periphery like sentinel towers. Clusters of power lines strung from poles crisscrossed overhead, a net to keep a boundary on the sky. There were no tourists there, no strolling shoppers, no parks or restaurants. The area had all the charm and functionality of a manhole cover.
ATL Body Shop was a long, white garage with several bays, each with its own pull-down door. Most of the doors were up, revealing cars in various stages of repair. Frankie’s father Ruben drove us there—which was unusual, because Frankie and I usually walked or took MARTA when we made our deliveries—and he pulled to the curb, then gestured at the garage as if to say, Here’s your stop; get out and be quick.
“You’re not coming?” Frankie said to his father.
Ruben shook his head. “I’ll be right here,” he said. I realized he hadn’t turned the engine off. Again he waved his hand at the garage. “Apúrate. And remember—don’t give him that envelope until he gives you one.” That was another odd thing—we were exchanging envelopes, not just delivering them.
We stepped out of Ruben’s car and crossed the concrete parking lot, wincing at the heat that slapped us, at the air we drew into our lungs like dragon’s breath, leaving an aftertaste of gasoline and hot rubber. An old maroon Honda Accord, its rear windshield starred and cracked, sat in front of an open bay as if abandoned, or simply too exhausted to roll forward into the shade of the bay.
I elbowed Frankie, and when he looked at me, I nodded at the Honda.
