Greg stumbled backward until his legs hit a chair and he sat down. “Ready for what? I was counting on you.”
“I know and I’m sorry. It’s just. They’re all you have left. They’re all you have, and seeing Grant the other night in the hospital, and sitting by his bedside, in that moment, I was right back with Joe and I promised myself then that I wouldn’t put myself in this position—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You said Grant was fine.”
“He is fine.”
“Then why was he in the hospital?”
Oh. “There’s a sculpture over his bed I didn’t have properly secured. It fell during the quake and hit him in the head. You know they were suspicious of that thing all along? Anyhow, he’ll be bruised. Slight concussion. Small cut.”
“Oh my god.”
Patrick paused, as if the details were just beyond his grasp. “I told him his scar would match mine.”
“Scar?!”
“Or maybe not. He’s young. He’ll probably heal much nicer. If not, I’ll find a guy.”
“To do what?”
“Get rid of it. Maybe he can work on your marionette lines. A twofer.”
Greg stood and raised his voice. “You think this is funny?”
“No, I don’t think it’s funny! You have no idea what I’m dealing with! Maisie wants a husband, Clara wants a wife. I can’t do this anymore. The earth is literally shaking underneath us. If that’s not as clear a sign as anything that I’m messing everything up—”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
“I can’t be the only one standing between you and having nothing left at all.”
Greg grabbed his temples and rubbed them so hard Patrick thought his fingers might crack his skull. “I need a drink.”
“Can . . . Can you do that? I mean, if your thing was pills?”
“My thing is pills, and no I can’t do that, you dim-witted twat.” Greg gnawed at his cuticle like he was working on a particularly irksome hangnail while he took a beat to calm down. “They have these smoothies here. Pear. Spinach. Ginger. Avocado, probably. Isn’t avocado mandatory in California? That’s all I drink anymore.”
“That sounds pretty good.” Patrick could even imagine it with vodka.
“Not sixty-six days in a row!”
Patrick agreed, bringing his hand to his mouth before realizing he was just copying Greg. It was uncomfortable. He’d never made his brother angry. Greg had never yelled at him so nakedly. “I took Mom to this restaurant once in LA after a taping of the show. This was years ago when she would actually fly. Upscale place. I thought it would be a treat. She took one look at the menu, slid it across the table at me, and complained that it was in another language.”
“Was it?”
“No! I told her, ‘That word is avocado—you know that!’”
Greg smiled weakly. Making fun of their mother was always safe terrain.
“It might have also said crudo,” he conceded. “That’s Italian, I guess. So maybe she was right.
“Patrick,” Greg started and stopped. “Do you know why I asked you take the kids?”
“My ebullient personality?” He offered a weak smile.
“Christ. I know you’re not over Joe. You float through life determined not to get attached to anyone or anything.” Greg crossed over to the window and watched a family visit in the courtyard. “This is as much for you as it is for them, Patrick. As it is for me.”
Patrick was appalled. “You gifted me your kids? To what, to fix me?”
“No. I knew they would be best off with you. But it was . . . What did you just call it?” Greg traced the lines that ran from each side of his nose to the corners of his mouth. “A twofer.”
Patrick scoffed.
“You think you’re so complicated. That you exist on a higher plane above everyone and everything else, thinking we can’t understand you. But you don’t and we do. You promised yourself you would never get that close to anyone again? And now all these years later you have allowed yourself. Or maybe not even allow—kids don’t give you much of a choice. But you feel something, and you’re scared and you’re trying to run from it and, goddammit, I won’t let you.”
“You’re going to stop me, locked up in here?”
Greg turned around and pressed his finger to Patrick’s sternum, hard. “Fuck you.”
“FUCK YOU!” Patrick took a seat on one of the sharply-angled chairs and waited for his anger to pass. “The stairwells in our college dorm. That’s what this place smells like. I’ve been racking my brain since I walked in here.”
“The stairwells?”
“Musty, mixed with old paint. Sara would get it.” Patrick scratched his head. “I don’t know how that’s possible, how it smells wet. The average rainfall here is nothing. It’s like Sara’s following me.” Patrick started to cry. “I should have come to see her.” The words hurt when he said them out loud. “I reasoned every moment I spent with her I was taking away from you and the kids.”
“She knew that. She understood.”
“She wasn’t mine anymore.”
There was a long silence before Greg spoke. “She knew that, too.”
Patrick turned and slapped the concrete wall with his open hand and it stung, reverberating through his wrist and arm. There was so much he had never processed. “I don’t know where that comes from. My anger. There’s a well, deep inside me. Most of the time I’m not even aware that it’s there. But then it comes bubbling up . . .”
“Remember the house in New Hampshire?” Greg asked.
“Our house? That new construction? Barely. We only lived there, what, a year?”
“Do you remember why?”
“Dad got transferred back to Connecticut.”
“No. It was the well. They dug and they dug and they dug and could never find enough water. Every night we shared an inch of bathwater, the
