“Aww, thank you. Come on in.”
We stepped inside and Elias unzipped his coat. The woodstove pumped out blazing heat that shimmered the air in front of it like a mirage. I stomped the snow from my boots onto the rug. Piper crossed the room to set the cookies down on the dining table. She still had a fine little ass, but not for me.
“Elias, you must have just gotten back,” she said. “How was it?”
“Not too bad,” he said. I cut a sideways glance at him. He’d had his thigh torn open down to the muscle by a piece of shrapnel, seen friends die, killed people. But around Piper it came out like an underwhelming vacation.
“Slimmed down a little, didn’t you?” she said, and he looked at the ground and chuckled even though getting her to notice that had been the sole reason he’d opened up his coat. I gave him a bemused sort of look, because this was as close as Elias got to pulling out his A-game. But then something in his face changed and when I looked over I saw a guy had come in from the back porch with his arms full of firewood. As he arranged it in the fireplace, Piper asked Elias about where he was working now (he wasn’t) and if he thought things had gotten better for women now that the Taliban was gone.
The guy got done kindling the fire and came over. Piper introduced us. His name was Michael. I was going to ask where he went to school, but then he wrapped his arm around Piper’s waist and said to my brother, “Army vet, huh? Thanks for your service.”
Maybe all siblings have this problem, but sometimes with my brother I might as well consult a Magic 8 Ball to figure out what’s going on in his head and other times it’s like I know everything. These tiny cues of his, they become like a code. As soon as that guy touched Piper I glanced at Elias, saw him looking at the guy’s hand for a split second before he zipped up his coat. “It wasn’t for you personally,” he said, and Piper laughed uneasily while Michael shot Elias an offended glare.
I didn’t say anything during the drive home. Nothing about him smoking in my car. We stomped back into the house, right into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my sister, Candy, was fussing around with a jelly roll cake. She had a big bowl of frosting on the island and was spreading it onto the cake in the pan. Mom asked, “You give the Larsens those cookies?”
Elias grunted a yes.
Candy licked her thumb and looked at Elias with reproach. “Well, you’re not giving them my Yule log cake.”
“Nobody wants your Yule log cake, Candy.”
“I’m just making sure. Since three-quarters of the Christmas cookies in this house just went down the street and now my boys hardly have any.”
“Don’t worry about it, Candy,” Mom scolded, low voiced. To Elias she said, “Did she like the cookies?”
“Goddamn it, Candy,” said Elias. “Lay off.”
She shrugged and sucked the frosting from her index finger. “Don’t bark at
I set my gloves on the table and didn’t dignify that with a reply. She hadn’t brought it up for any other reason except to imply to Elias that he was pursuing my sloppy seconds. Elias, though, took the bait like a raccoon to a tin of cat food. He kicked out the chair he’d been unlacing his boot against so it skidded across the kitchen floor just past Candy. His voice projected in a straight line. “What part of ‘lay off’ don’t you understand?”
“Eli,” said our mother in her soft voice, soothing, imploring. She said it again, and for a second I flashed on the time he fell out of that oak tree while we were building the tree house, knocked himself unconscious. She had pulled his head onto her lap then, whispering to him while we waited for the ambulance.
“She doesn’t know when to quit,” he shouted, still looking at Candy. “Mind your own damn business, will you? Bake your stupid cake and shut your freakin’ mouth for once.”
He shoved another chair across the floor for good measure, then stormed off through the back porch, his bootlaces ticking against the floor. The back door slammed. A minute later we all heard the whack of that ax slicing into what was left of the tree. Then again, and again.
It was things like that that made me leave Jill back in Maryland for the second year in a row. And it wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Dodge hadn’t even showed up.
I still remembered the day Elias announced he’d enlisted in the army. It was during that whole Piper pregnancy scare. Mom looked really startled, and Dodge gave him this peeved-off look and said, “What the hell’d you go and do that for?” That was the giddiest I’ve ever seen Elias look. I knew what he was thinking:
Maybe half the reason I was so smooth about it when Jill broke the pregnancy news to me was that last time all my histrionics had turned out to be nothing. Maybe I felt that this time would have the same outcome, because the panic with the Jill situation was more of a slow burn. But this time it wasn’t going away, and in addition to that, after a few weeks she was
And then exams ended, and it was nearly summer. Ever since I left home to go to school, I’d found a way to stick around College Park between semesters. There was always someone whose apartment I could crash at. But this year I looked at Jill, who was pretty damn pregnant, and at my job, which paid about the same as a shoe factory in India, and knew the old plan wasn’t going to work anymore. The baby was due August 24. If I wanted there to be any chance of me going back to school in the fall, my life between now and then needed to be as cheap as possible. So I had no choice. This summer I was going back to Frasier, and Jill was coming with me.
My hero, then and now, was Teddy Roosevelt. He was all about the qualities that make a man a real man and how to be admirable and noble and all that stuff. Right there on my wall, on a postcard Jill had seen a hundred times, was his Rough Riders portrait with my favorite quote underneath it: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” I wish I could say the situation with Jill brought out the best in me, but in all honesty that would be a lie.
You wouldn’t believe how thin the line is between gratitude and resentment. The more you owe somebody, the more you hate them for all they can afford to give you when you don’t have shit. After all those months he sheltered her, Stan had given us more than I could ever repay. And I knew when we got to Frasier, Elias wouldn’t think twice about how he had stood by me through a stupid mistake years ago and now, 112 college credits later, I still couldn’t figure out how to operate my own dick. I should have felt really thankful about all that, but somehow it just made me want to punch somebody in the face.
