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  It also suggests the gulf between who we were sure we would be, and who we have instead become. I feel this every day. I imagine Jamie does too—how could he not?—but probably doesn’t expect me to feel it.

  Of this I’m certain: the real differences between us are negligible, though we appear to represent two entirely different approaches to living. While he struggles to keep ahead of the yardwork, the sagging eaves, the minivan’s oil changes, I come away looking collected. My black suits with their clean lines, my well-paying position with Witt-DeKalb Investments, my tidy, airy apartment near Lincoln Park in Chicago, and the Moroccan and Nepalese restaurants I dine at, they all speak to something nearly opposite to Jamie’s life here in Blue Mound. But the truth is that I have kept things small, manageable, in order to maintain the illusion of control. Jamie has allowed himself no such luxury. We want the same things, finally. We want the same woman, too; or at least we once did. I don’t precisely know where Jamie stands on that issue these days. He is on the surface of things content with his duplicitous arrangement. Brenda Canty satisfies certain doubts he would otherwise harbour about himself, and she demands very little of him. A few hours carved from the corpus of his week, and the occasional nice dinner someplace dark in Springfield, if he can find the time. Though friendly and cheery, Brenda is frankly not the woman Janet is, but I suppose that’s largely the point.

  At the giant hardware store a yellow-haired girl rings up our sale, pointing a wireless scanner at the tags on the ends of the pieces of lumber, the brackets, the boxes of nails, the spackle and drywall patch kit, until the little unit beeps. When she’s not using her hands she tucks them into her orange canvas apron. When finally she announces the total, it causes me to glance at the small digital screen atop the register to confirm I’ve heard right. Jamie, unblinking, slaps his credit card down on the counter. “Put that right on there,” he says.

  We wheel the orange cart full of lumber and supplies out into the parking lot and begin to load the van, folding the seats into the floor and then piling the eight-foot boards atop that, and right up between the driver and passenger seats. The tension that was present in the van before we went into the store has been replaced by a breezy feeling, a sense, perhaps bestowed by the giant hardware store, that things are possible, that things can get done. Between us now is an easy give and take, an attitude like fuck it, it’s the Memorial Day weekend, and the sun is out in America. Our afternoon promises hammers and power tools and cold beer. I’ll get a burn on my forearms. There will be barbecued hamburgers. The kids will climb trees. There is an obvious difference of opinions in the van about the Brenda thing, but we’re not about to solve it, so we just leave it alone. Jamie starts up the motor, pops out the CD and turns on the radio. It’s a sports talk station, and they’re talking about baseball.

  Jamie’s loyalty to the Royals, here in the thick of Cubs and, to a lesser degree, White Sox territory, is no fluke. We were both born in Kansas City, but our father moved us up to Illinois so that he could manage a wholesale feed and seed outfit when I was six and Jamie was ten. Jamie can remember watching George Brett play, whereas I didn’t form any sort of lasting allegiance until later, once we were already up here, so by that time it was Ryne Sandberg and the Cubs for me. It still is the Cubs, which marks me either a romantic or a fool. Take your pick.

  It must be a hundred degrees under the early afternoon sun by the time we have the old porch stripped down and ready for rebuilding.

  “Beer o’clock yet?” Jamie asks while hunched over a pair of sawhorses with a pencil in one hand and a tape measure in the other. The sweat pours over our faces, soaks through our shirts. Janet appears every now and then with a pitcher of ice water, then disappears again to the backyard where she’s busy in the garden.

  By 4:30 we have a new frame built, a lattice of two-by-fours strung between the four-by-fours we have carriage-bolted to the old posts, having decided that digging new postholes and pouring cement will make the job something bigger than we can reasonably expect to finish in two-and-a-half days. The old posts are rot-free, solid, and well rooted. They’ll do. We set the new ones to level and bolt them in place, then build our frame off that.

  The burgers are juicy and the beer cold as the early evening sun slants through the poplars. Voices float on the hot wind; it sounds as though the neighbours are having a barbecue, too. Children laugh and shout. The crickets start to chime in, like a ringing in the ears. Janet works the grill, making cheeseburgers with fried onions on toasted buns, potato salad rich with red onion and Miracle Whip. The ice in the beer cooler has all melted. My face is hot with sunburn, and somewhere a lawnmower whirs.

  I can feel it in my muscles and bones: there will be no rooftop sitting this night. Jamie’s been hitting the beer hard since we called it a day and packed the tools and lumber into the garage, stacked the old lumber in a neat pile out behind the garden shed. Now he’s slumped low in his plastic deck chair, his face red as a beet, his eyelids heavy. The kids all but mind themselves nearby, spraying each other with the hose and splashing in the wading pool, which is full of water beneath a layer of grass clippings. Angela laughs; Robbie, ruddy and sodden, screams.

  The longest shadows have reached the other side of the yard when Janet stands up, finishes the last of her beer and tells the kids to pack up their pool noodles. Time to get ready for bed. They moan, offer protest, and many minutes later follow her inside, wrapped in bright towels. The patio door closes behind them with a soft whoosh.

  Jamie and I sit together in silence for a moment. He sighs deeply. “God, she’s something, isn’t she?” he asks cryptically.

  The last of the sunset sweetens the western sky as he stands and picks up the cooler, retrieves the last four cans of Bud from the icy water, and dumps the rest of the contents off the side of the deck.

  “I’m turning in early, brother,” he says, teetering before the sliding door. “You good?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. You sleep well,” I say. “Back at it tomorrow.”

  “Yessir,” he says, saluting. “Goodnight.” He is off into the darkened house. I hear him walking past the bathroom where Janet is getting Robbie and Angela cleaned up for bed. I begin to gather condiments, glasses and plates from the patio table. Angela appears behind the screen of the patio door in a long pink nightgown with large-headed princesses on it.

  “Goodnight, Uncle Richie,” she says.

  “Come here and gimme a hug before bed, Angie.” She slides open the screen and pads across the deck into my waiting arms, and sinks into me. She smells of soap bubbles. She has her mother’s dark hair.

  “Sleep well, sweet Angie.”

  “I will,” she says, then rubs her eyes and tiptoes away.

  Her children and husband safely tucked away, Janet sits at the table in the darkened kitchen, a dish towel thrown over her left shoulder, a sweating can of beer in front of her. I stand leaning against the dishwasher. We are alone. She asks if I want a last beer, and I gratefully accept. It’s the first time I’ve been alone with her this weekend. She looks tired. She stands, walks to the fridge and gets me a tallboy.

  “Shoot, I could’ve gotten that, Jan,” I say. The window over the sink is open and a cool breeze wafts through. Clouds have rolled in, blotting the stars. It has begun to rain softly, a light, cool shower that sounds like faint hissing from where I stand. It will be gone by morning, I know, and the sun will roll back out, burning off the dampness. Jamie and I will be back at it by mid-morning, sawing and hammering, measuring and cutting the decking boards, the long straight pieces of pressure-treated lumber that will mutely witness whatever does or does not happen to this family over the coming months and years. Janet will carry groceries over them. Robbie will skin his knees on them. Angela will escort friends across them. What will my brother do?

  Janet is tired. I want to tell her everything I know about Jamie and Brenda.

  “My god, those kids of yours have grown,” I say.

  “Like bad w
eeds,” she says, then smiles. “They’re good kids.” We stand side by side in the kitchen and outside the rain falls. Janet’s shoulders drop and she rubs the back of her neck with a rough hand, her nails still blackened with garden soil. In the dim light of the bulb in the range hood I notice the tiny lines beginning to creep outward from the corners of her eyes. “Robbie told me the other day that he wanted to sign up for basketball,” she says. I think of Brenda Canty and imagine both women in the bleachers of a gymnasium, cheering Robbie on as he stands at the free throw line, neither aware of the other in the buzzing, yellowy light.

  “Hope he’s better than his dad was,” I say.

  She looks down at the linoleum tile, then gives herself a little hug, her arms folded across her stomach. I’m still looking at Janet’s face, and I can’t bring myself to speak. Maybe there was a time when I’d have moved in and held her now, consoled her from a sadness she doesn’t quite realize she ought to be feeling. But that’s not the way we live now.

  Truth is I don’t even know what I’d say. Jesus Christ, I think to myself, he’s my brother. Janet pushes herself away from the counter and stands straight, pulls her shoulders back to work out an ache. She looks straight at me with her hazel eyes.

  “You got what you need, Richie?”

  “I guess I do,” I say.

  “Alright then,” she says, then slaps the dishtowel down on the counter and turns off the light over the stove. “I’m off to bed. Jim’ll wonder where I’m at.” Then she moves silently down the hall and into the bedroom.

  IN THE FOOTHILLS

  Marty came down out of the mountains in early March, trailing a string of bad decisions. He started high up in the Rockies and swept into Calgary, coasting at great speed, like his brake lines had been cut.

  I was working in a big sporting goods store, selling skis and running shoes and golf clubs. I had been thinking about heading back to Ontario, but that would’ve required putting my tail between my legs, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet.

  He’d been married to my sister for a short time, before she cracked up. My mother still says Eileen’s “taken ill.” Most recently Marty had been in Hundred Mile House, doing I don’t know what, exactly. The details were vague. Before that he’d been in Vancouver. Trouble trailed him like a wake; bad ideas poured off him like a stench. Every time I saw him he was driving a different car. Not new cars, but different ones. This time it was a blue Cavalier with lightning bolts down the sides.

  Since he and Eileen split and she walked herself into an emergency room wearing a nightgown, Marty has drifted like pollen from place to place, his welding papers in his back pocket. He’d stay for a time, use up his luck, then move on to the next town. He’d done like that after he got out of the Air Force at Cold Lake, but then he met Eileen and they had a couple of years where they imitated normal people, settled in one place, rented a nice house east of the city. They stayed in nights. Then real colours began to show through and things went haywire, like I’d felt they would.

  Since then he and I have kept in touch, in a fashion, and all the while I’ve battled feelings of guilt for some sort of disloyalty to my sister. But then again I have since childhood suspected my sister to be the cause of all bad things.

  Marty is big. Not obese, just large, built on a different scale than most human beings. He stands about six-foot-four, and his limbs are like telephone poles. His torso is like the front of a transport truck, and on his feet he wears a size thirteen or fourteen pair of boots. When he drinks, which he often does, it’s usually from something big, a jar or a big plastic travel coffee mug. He drinks vodka mostly, Russians or screwdrivers. Drinks them like water. Sometimes the only way you can tell he’s on his way down is that his face and neck get beet red. Eventually he just collapses. Finds a bed or a sofa and you can forget about Marty for twelve hours or so.

  The thing with Marty is, when he comes to stay with you, there’s no way of knowing how long he’ll be there. He arrived on a Saturday afternoon and immediately went to sleep on the futon in the other room, the room that had been empty since my roommate skipped out on me. Marty stayed there until midday Sunday. I could hear him snoring. Once or twice in the night I heard him get up to use the bathroom, a bear of a man, a lumberjack shaking the whole apartment as he moved, then planting his feet before the toilet and uncorking a torrent. Water running, then slow, heavy footsteps back down the hallway, the sound of a California redwood being felled as he tumbled back into bed, and then nothing, just faint sawing for hours and hours thereafter.

  A chinook had followed Marty down from the hills, and Sunday was a warm, springy day, a breeze alive with smells where the day before it had been cold and dead. By Sunday noon it was a beaut of a day, the sun at its full strength, the sound of water running off the roofs, everything slick. I could sit at my window and watch the snowbanks below melting like ice cubes in an empty glass. I’d opened the windows and was listening to CCR when Marty emerged from the second bedroom. I always listen to CCR when winter turns to spring, and even if this was a false beginning, I needed to feel good about things after the winter I’d had.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” he asked me.

  “Polishing my boots,” I said. I was standing hunched over the table where I’d spread out newspapers, some spare rags, and an old shoebox containing my polish kit: a tin of polish, two brushes, and a shining rag.

  “Look at you, your highness!”

  “Sunday,” I said. “Every Sunday I polish my boots. My dad used to do it.”

  “I see,” he said, then looked around, sniffed, and rubbed his stomach. The smell of polish must have reminded him of the smell of food.

  “Got any vittles here?” he asked.

  “Sure, yeah. Cereal, toast…”

  “Eggs? Bacon? Potatoes?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “though the potatoes might have sprouted.”

  “All right then, you do your thing, I’ll cook.” And he did. He went to work in my pathetic little kitchen, and with a cutting board, a dull knife, and a single fry pan he beavered away until he had made us a rich spread of eggs and bacon, toast, beans, and warm stewed tomatoes. When my plate was empty he refilled it. Only once I was done did Marty sit down and eat. He had thirds, finished everything. I had forgotten this about Marty, that he loved to spend time in the kitchen, and that Eileen never had to cook.

  By mid-afternoon, still full, we were sitting on the couch sharing my cigarettes, the sliding door to the patio wide open to let in the sweet warm breeze. CCR had given way to Rush in the five-disc changer: Marty’s choice.

  “What time do you work tomorrow?” he asked me.

  “One,” I said. “One ‘til close.”

  “Good, then you can sleep in,” he said, lighting another.

  “Why do I need to sleep in?”

  “There’s a bar I think we should close tonight,” he said. “Passed it on the way here.”

  And I thought, why not? What’s the worst that can happen to me, in the company of this man who’d cooked me such a generous meal, on a Sunday night in the foothills with the warm breath of springtime upon me?

  “Let’s do that,” I said.

  We took my truck, the truck I drove out to Alberta from Kingston, the truck that I lived in for two weeks until I found an apartment. It occurred to me that there was no definite plan as to what we might do with the truck, how we might get back to my apartment or, failing that, where we would stay after this night of drinking. It’s something I felt that we were actively not discussing, a thing floating between us. I kept returning to it in my head, but deciding that I shouldn’t bring it up, because I felt like Marty was daring me to do just that, to be the responsible one, so that he could be proven, in a single chop, the opposite. Marty defined himself by these sorts of oppositions.

  We drove west, straight toward the Rockies, which loomed purple and holy before us, an unreal painted backdrop. The last of the sun was honey oozing between the peaks, and through it
we moved slowly, lazily. In the middle distance the foothills burped up from the prairie, little practice runs, junior topography. That’s where we were headed, to a place called the Starlite, located nowhere in particular, just a sign, a parking lot, and a roadhouse.

  We stood in the parking lot, Marty and I, feeling—what? Apprehension? Excitement? It’s likely, given what transpired later, that we were not feeling the same thing at that moment, though it felt for all the world that we were comrades, men linked by uneven pasts and a hope that the near future, namely this night, would prove to be a kind one.

  We leaned against the truck and did some damage to a six-pack liberated from my fridge. The light disappeared and the night came on and we watched two or three trucks pull in, their drivers making their way to the Starlite’s steel door with their heads down.

  My hair plastered down and my boots newly polished, I felt like a handsome devil. Maybe there’d be women inside, I thought. That’s why I had come, for drinks and whatever interesting faces this evening might invite in. The usual things. I assumed that’s why Marty had brought us out there, an assumption I’d find to be false in due time.

  Marty specialized in broken women: those who’d known bad men, bad times, those who’d become familiar with the youth justice system. That’s what drew him to my sister, of course. She hadn’t yet gone off the rails, but he saw something in her. Marty would ride their momentum for a time, have some laughs, then jump off before things completely fell apart. He had a knack for it. When you were riding alongside Marty you would meet women who quickly began to tell you about themselves—everything in one sitting—and you’d hear some crazy things. Then they’d want you to commend them on their strength, given all they’d endured. Sometimes I’d say something along the lines of, “Well, we’ve all got trouble, sweetness, but we don’t necessarily go blabbing it to the first person we meet in a bar.” This stance had, on more than one occasion, hurt Marty’s chances with certain women, and he openly discouraged me from adopting it, or at least voicing it. I’d try to comply, if only because part of me felt that I owed Marty something.