When You Were Older (retail) Read online

  In the photo, I was there with her. I was not even two. Leaning on her, holding her fur in a way that must have hurt her, while she smiled. Patient. Proud. I’d learned to walk by holding her that way.

  I took the album back into the TV room.

  I turned the TV volume down to almost nothing again.

  ‘Hey!’ Ben said. ‘I’m watching this!’

  ‘This was Sandy.’

  I set the album on his lap.

  His eyes came away from the TV for the first time I could remember.

  He touched the photo.

  ‘Oh!’ he said. Hushed. Reverent. ‘She’s a good dog! She’s a nice dog!’

  Bingo. Oh, snap. I’d done it.

  ‘See? You remember.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know she’s a good dog?’

  ‘Well. Just look. Just look at her.’

  Nice try, I thought. Next time I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate myself.

  ‘Hey. Ben. Wait a minute. If you don’t remember her, how did you know she was a she?’

  I hadn’t used any gender-specific pronouns.

  Ben didn’t answer for a long time.

  Then he said, ‘That’s a hard question.’

  He closed the wooden scrapbook and dropped it on the rug, and his eyes returned to the TV.

  I sighed.

  ‘Let’s try this a different way. Maybe instead of expecting to see Mom the old way, the way you’re used to, maybe you could be open to something new.’

  I was pretty sure he wasn’t listening.

  Until he said, ‘What?’

  ‘Like, maybe you won’t see her again. But maybe you can feel her here.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I see her?’ He sounded agitated. Suddenly alarmed.

  ‘I just meant, maybe you’ll feel her looking over your shoulder. You know. Still with you.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t I see her?’

  Ben struggled to his feet and began to pace in that special way that only Ben paced. I’d forgotten all about it.

  The refresher course didn’t take long.

  My brother Ben didn’t pace in a straight line. And he didn’t go around in a circle either, though the effect was similar. Ben paced endless squares. Out with the left foot, out with the right, sharp ninety-degree left turn, repeat. Around and around in a clumsy box of his own creation. All he had to do was miss a turn to escape the box. But he never did. Until he was damn good and ready.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I see her?’ he wailed.

  ‘Ben, I—’

  ‘You tell me why I wouldn’t see her, Buddy. Why wouldn’t I see her?’

  And that was my second fast refresher. After the pacing box, the broken record. Once Ben got off on a tear like that, repeating the same impassioned question more than two or three times, his clutch seemed to stick. No more shifting gears for some time.

  I was in for a long night.

  Brilliant, Russell, I thought. You sure did a stellar job on that.

  Unclear for the moment on how these situations used to be handled – I was remembering each phase of this as I went along – I jumped up and tried to stop him. I stood in front of him, so he’d have to stop his obsessive box-pacing to keep from bowling me down.

  Then I was on the rug looking up at the ceiling, and wondering how badly I’d twisted the muscle I felt twanging in my back.

  He hadn’t struck me. He hadn’t even pushed me out of the way. He just hadn’t stopped.

  ‘Buddy,’ I said, absorbing his panic. ‘Stop.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t I see her?’

  I ducked out of the TV room, and into the living room, where I breathed long and deeply. I could still hear him, repeating the same question. Over and over. And over. And over.

  What did we used to do, my mom and me?

  Well. I knew the answer to that. We didn’t. She did.

  Then I was hit with a strange thought. Here I was telling Ben to be open to feeling Mom with him. Was I willing to try the cure I was prescribing?

  ‘OK, Mom,’ I said. ‘What did you used to do?’

  Chalk it up to the fact that I’d turned my mind a hundred per cent to the question. Because I don’t forget things. So if I hadn’t known before, it’s because I hadn’t yet tried to remember.

  ‘Cookies,’ I said out loud.

  When Ben would get stuck, our mom would bake cookies. And Ben’s tantrum would last just about as long as it took her to bake them, and let them cool a bit. And then she’d bring them in to Ben and say, ‘Look, honey. Cookies.’ And by then he’d be tired and rundown, and enough of a distraction could break the cycle. And cookies were enough of a distraction.

  There was only one problem. I didn’t know how to bake cookies.

  ‘Well, Mom?’ I asked.

  And then I had another remembering. When we were little, she’d made them from scratch. But then later, when she had enough to do looking after Ben, she’d given that up. Gone instead to the type you buy at the market, as unbaked tubes of dough. Because the difference was lost on Ben anyway.

  I ran to the kitchen. Even in the kitchen I could hear him.

  ‘You tell me, Buddy! You tell me why I wouldn’t see her!’

  I rummaged through the freezer and found no cookie dough. Just my luck these days. But then I thought, maybe you don’t freeze them. Maybe you keep them in the refrigerator. I opened the fridge door, purposely not looking at the postcards.

  And there it was. Granted, I had to lift two casserole dishes to see it. But I found it. Two-thirds of a tube of chocolate-chip cookie dough in a plastic ziplock sandwich bag.

  My luck seemed to be changing.

  I set about following the directions on the tube. But it was hard, because the first couple of words of each sentence had been cut off for previous batches.

  But I got the oven temperature. Three hundred and fifty degrees. And I figured out that you cut the dough into one-inch rounds and cut the rounds into quarters. And then baked them for … that part was cut off. I could only see a two. So, two minutes? Twelve? Twenty-two?

  I reminded myself not to panic, or hurry. After all, Ben wasn’t going to hurry his tantrum. The whole idea was in the timing. In the way we would meet up at the end.

  ‘Cool on a wire rack.’

  I plowed through what seemed like every cupboard, and found no wire rack. They’d just have to cool on something else.

  I cut eight, and then sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands while they baked. I purposely didn’t go back into the TV room with Ben. I couldn’t. I couldn’t unhook from his tantrum. Watching him, listening to him, made me feel like I was falling apart, just as surely as he was.

  After a while I put my hands over my ears. Hard.

  About fifteen minutes after that, I was using a spatula to lift eight cookies on to a yellow plastic plate, noting that Ben’s voice had gotten hoarse and quiet. In fact, I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  But I still knew.

  I stood at the open door of the TV room, cookies in hand. I think he smelled them. I saw him miss a step.

  ‘Look, Buddy. I made you cookies.’

  He stopped.

  Oh my God. He stopped.

  It’s hard to describe the relief.

  He’d been crying. His eyes were red, his face streaked with tears. And his nose was running. I mean running. Not a little. Buckets.

  I got him a box of tissues from my mom’s bedroom, and, when I got back, he was sitting in one of the stuffed chairs, eating a cookie.

  I handed him five or six tissues, but he just held them in one hand and kept eating. So I took them back, and wiped his nose.

  It was a low moment in our relationship.

  I threw away the tissues and then just sat watching him.

  ‘Can I have a cookie, too?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  And then, after a long pause, he held the plate out in my direction. But all I could think about was the running faucet of his no
se.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘They’re all for you.’

  ‘Mom’s are better.’

  And that’s what I get for being a nice guy. That is, if I am.

  ‘They’re both made from exactly the same dough.’

  ‘But hers are baked right. This is burned. Right here.’

  He showed me the bottom of the cookie. He was right. It was blackened all around one edge.

  ‘Sorry. I did my best. But I’m not much of a baker.’

  Oddly, as I said it, I thought about that girl who was. Even though I’d only met her the one time.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll just give the burny part to …’

  I waited for him to finish the sentence. But he never did. But he tipped his hand on where he’d been headed with that thought. He reached the burned edge of cookie out and down toward the floor. To about dog level.

  So, he remembered. Even though maybe he didn’t remember that he remembered. Or maybe I’d just gotten him thinking about dogs by showing him the picture.

  But … no. You can think about dogs all you want, but if you’ve never had one, as best you can recall, you don’t automatically give them your only-slightly-less-than-edible leftovers. That’s not instinct. That’s habit.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Who what?’ As if he’d forgotten the entire proposition.

  He set the burned edge of cookie on the very outermost edge of his plate.

  ‘Who were you going to give that to?’

  Ben thought that over for a time.

  ‘That’s a hard question,’ he said.

  He looked up to the TV screen. The cartoon show was over. I glanced at my watch. Seven minutes after eight. So much for Patty Jespers’s declaration of ‘Not a minute sooner. Not a minute later.’

  I watched his eyes go wide.

  ‘Time is it?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Seven minutes after eight.’

  He dropped the plate on to the floor. Cookies rolled in every possible direction.

  ‘Past my bedtime.’

  ‘It’s just a few minutes.’

  ‘But I go to bed at eight.’

  ‘It’s just—’

  ‘I have to brush my teeth. I have to go to work tomorrow. I can’t be tired. Mr McCaskill wouldn’t like it if I was tired.’

  He hurried off – as best Ben knew how to hurry – while I searched for cookies under the furniture.

  I was down to one missing cookie when he called in to me.

  ‘You have to come tuck me in.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Out loud. But not to him. Not loud enough for him to hear. ‘Of course I have to go tuck him in.’

  I also had to give him a kiss on the temple, right at his hairline. Just the way Mom used to do. He pointed carefully, so I’d get just the right spot.

  ‘Night, Buddy,’ I said.

  ‘Hey. Buddy. Want to know … something?’

  ‘Sure. What?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I see her?’

  I tried not to sigh. But the sigh more or less sighed itself.

  ‘Night, Buddy. See you in the morning.’

  I turned out the light. But the world’s brightest night light must have been on at all times. All day as well as all night. Because it didn’t get much darker in Ben’s room.

  16 September 2001

  I CRUISED BY Nazir’s Baked Goods at six forty the following morning. Stopped out front.

  If anything, the street, the town, seemed even more deserted than it had the morning before. Then again, it was Sunday. So it had some excuse.

  It struck me that the bakery might be closed on Sunday. A lot of non-essential businesses were, in this Christian town. And maybe that glow of light in the kitchen was like Ben’s night light. A constant.

  But then I saw a flash of her head, on her way to the oven, through the window.

  I shifted my mom’s old Buick into park, and shut off the engine.

  That’s when I noticed the issue with the bakery window. Right on the word NAZIR’S, someone had hit the glass with two raw eggs, which dripped their yolks obscenely down the window and on to the brick below.

  I wondered if she even knew yet.

  I reached for the front door. Her head came up, and she motioned me around the side. I walked around to the tiny bakery parking lot and saw an employee’s entrance into the kitchen. It was open.

  She smiled when she saw me come in. That felt good. Seemed like it had been a while since anyone had.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘You came back, Ben’s brother.’

  I was so tired and disheartened that I was almost willing to accept that as my new name. I offered no answer of any kind.

  ‘We don’t open till eight on Sundays. So I don’t even have the donuts cut yet. But come in and talk to me. It won’t take too long. And I have coffee made. No offense, but you look very bad. Worse than you did yesterday. I was hoping you would feel a little better by now.’

  ‘I had a bad night with Ben. Have you got a bucket? Something I could put soapy water in? And maybe a scrub brush or a big sponge?’

  She looked at me strangely.

  ‘Your mother didn’t keep such things at your house?’

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for you. For your front window. Somebody hit it with eggs.’

  Her smile disappeared. I heard her mutter a couple of words under her breath, but I didn’t make out what they were. I’m not entirely sure they were English.

  ‘Right on my father’s name?’

  So that’s who Nazir is, I thought. That’s the other half of her ‘we’.

  I guess I wasn’t answering fast enough. So she went on.

  ‘So maybe the donuts won’t just be a few minutes. I have to tend to this other matter first.’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ I said. ‘You do the donuts. I’ll get the window. I just need a bucket and something to scrub with.’

  She looked into my face for a long moment. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She disappeared into a back storeroom and came out with an aluminum bucket. I watched her partially fill it with hot water at the big industrial double sink. She added a shot of dishwashing liquid.

  The bucket steamed as she handed it to me. I thought she’d forgotten the scrub brush, but I looked in and saw the end of it sticking up out of the sudsy water.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ she said. ‘But it’s nice. Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know why you gave me coffee and donuts for free yesterday. But sometimes people are nice to each other. Not everybody’s an ass. I guess I’m apologizing to you for the egg thrower. On behalf of my entire nationality.’

  She laughed a little. It was nice to see a bit of lightness return.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

  ‘Right. If I ever catch the son of a bitch, that’s what I’ll tell him about you.’

  Now her face seemed to have returned to its original relaxed smile. And I thought, What a small price to pay for such a good thing.

  ‘There’s a hose on the other side of the building. In the alley between here and the bank. It’s very long. We use it to hose off the sidewalk out front.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll be back in a bit.’

  I stepped out into the cool morning, glad to have a simple, predictable mission. It was that hour of morning my dad used to call civil twilight – the first few minutes you can see your hand in front of your face. Plus the streetlight on the corner helped. Still, it felt for all the world like a movie set. I still was not convinced I was in a real place.

  I carried the bucket to the front window, and, thinking very little about who put them there and why, scrubbed away the raw eggs. They were freshly thrown, and still wet, so it didn’t take much. I listened to the sound of the scrub brush bristles against the rough brick under the window, and found it comforting for reasons I couldn’t pin down. I felt the pinch of the muscle I’d pulled in my back th
e night before. But it was OK. It wasn’t too bad. I fetched the hose from the alley and blasted away the soap, using the force of the water to wash it, and the eggshells, off the curb and into the storm drain. I replaced the hose, turning it off and then releasing the water still trapped inside. Because … I don’t know why. It’s just the way I was taught to do things. I poured the soapy water from the bucket down the storm drain and went back inside.

  She looked up and smiled at me. She was just, in that exact moment, slapping an enormous mound of dough – that would soon be my morning donut – on to the table. I stood at the door a moment, watching her roll it out with a heavy wooden rolling pin, in motions almost too fast for my eyes to follow.

  ‘You can just leave the bucket under the sink for now. And you can wash your hands in that sink, or you can use our bathroom. Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, that was nothing.’

  But it was something. It was just something I didn’t mind.

  When I got back from washing my hands, she pointed with a flip of her head to a high stool, which I sat on.

  I watched her cut the donuts.

  In her right hand she held a metal cookie cutter – well, donut cutter – and she moved along the sheet of dough with blinding speed, leaving classic donut shapes marked into the dough, complete with holes. With her left hand she followed along, pulling them up, leaving the centers on the table, placing the perfect circles on a wire rack.

  ‘You want to talk about it?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ I asked, thinking I sounded like my brother. I could only imagine she was referring to the eggs on the window, and that didn’t require much processing. At least, not on my end.

  ‘You said you had a bad night with Ben.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Well. Not a bad night, so much. More a bad evening. Then he went to sleep at eight and forgot the whole thing, and I was so rattled I was up till three thirty, and then at twenty after six he gets me up to drive him to work. So that’s why I look tired. I mean, even more so.’