My Brother's Keeper

by Patricia McCormick

  Except that when I get home, Jake just sits on the couch staring at whatever’s for sale on the Home Shopping Network.

  Not only is he not in a yelping-hollering-goofing-around kind of mood, which, to tell you the truth, he’s actually never in anymore, he’s in one of those moods when he’s there but not really there. When he’s stoned.

  Which makes me want to headlock him and wrestle him and maybe even actually sort of hurt him so that he comes back to being his normal self. Or else sneak out of the house before he sees me seeing him that way and maybe come back later when he’s his normal self.

  Instead, I stand between him and the TV.

  “You’ll never guess what I have,” I say, all out of breath.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “C’mon,” I say. “Try to guess.”

  He doesn’t try to guess. He just keeps staring at the TV. His eyes are red and itchy-looking.

  “You’ll never guess,” I say.

  He finally looks at me, except that it’s like he’s sort of looking past me. “If I’ll never guess,” he says, “why don’t you just tell me?”

  I don’t exactly know how to respond to that logic, so I set the card down on the rug in front of him.

  He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t whoop or holler or even move a muscle.

  “What did it cost you?” he says finally.

  I happen to know that it’s technically worth more than two years’of my allowance. But I don’t tell him that. I also don’t tell him that Mr. D gave it to me, which is a highly private fact that you don’t tell somebody, especially somebody who doesn’t whoop or holler or thump you on the back when you show him a mint condition Stargell rookie card and who only wants to know what it cost.

  I shrug.

  He gives me an annoyed look; then he sort of smiles, and I can see the pointy teeth on the side of his mouth—like when our former dog Harriet the Horrible got old and unpredictable and started snapping at little kids in the neighborhood and we had to put her to sleep—and I wonder if he’s going to start laughing like crazy the way he does when he’s like this or if he’s just going to completely forget that I’m even here.

  So I pick up the Stargell and leave.

  I cross the front yard where Eli is sitting on Tonto with the kickstand down. He’s wearing his cowboy hat and yelling at Tonto to giddyup, even though technically he’s not even moving. He’s only allowed to ride on the sidewalk and there are no sidewalks here in Colonial. Mews, this cheesy, fake-historic apartment complex where we moved after our dad left.

  I grab my skateboard and head out across the yard.

  As soon as Eli sees me, he tells Tonto to whoa. “Where you going?” he says.

  I look across the parking lot, over toward the highway. Everything good—our old house, Mr. D’s, the park—is on the other side of the highway, which according to our mom is a death trap.

  I shrug. “Nowhere.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Mom says you’re not allowed.”

  “Please?”

  I don’t know what to say. I feel bad for Eli not being able to actually ride his bike anywhere like a normal kid. But the good thing about Eli is that he isn’t a normal kid; he’s the kind of kid who, if you tell him he can’t do something normal, does something weird, like pretending his bike is a horse right out in the front yard, and isn’t even embarrassed about it.

  “It’s okay,” he says after a minute. “Tonto’s pretty tired from the cattle drive, aren’t you, boy?”

  Tonto doesn’t let on if he’s tired or not, so I just get on my skateboard and ride across the parking lot, and out to the overpass. I don’t go back to the old neighborhood, though. I just stand up on the overpass and watch the cars whoosh by on the highway underneath until it’s practically dinnertime.

  Dinner that night is shrimp cocktail, courtesy of the Food King. The Food King is this giant frozen-food warehouse across from the mall. The Food King is also a person: he’s one of our mom’s clients at the Hairport, a rich guy who owns the Food King, but who always gives her a box of frozen food when she cuts his hair instead of giving her an actual tip. He even stars in his own highly lame TV commercials, which feature him personally, wearing a crown and a fur-trimmed cape. Our mom says he likes it when the other stylists at the Hairport call him Your Highness.

  Jake calls him Your Heinie.

  “Looks like dinner came from Your Heinie tonight,” says Jake. His voice has a slow-motion sound, but no one notices except me.

  Eli, who’s in second grade and who, therefore, thinks any mention of body parts is insanely funny, practically has a spaz attack trying not to laugh. “The food came from your heinie,” he says, crinkling up his nose, which has about 185 million freckles on it, and pointing to his butt, which isn’t much of a butt on account of him being so skinny. “Get it?”

  Our mom gives him a look like she has some kind of major, long-term headache. Which is pretty much how she’s looked ever since our dad left, which sometimes makes me think that maybe she might really be sick, maybe even dying, of some rare incurable disease without knowing it. The only time she doesn’t look like maybe she’s secretly, fatally ill is when Jake makes her laugh.

  “Methinks His Heinie is wooing our fair mother,” Jake says.

  Our mom pretends to be annoyed, but you can tell she’s not.

  “Perhaps he wants to make her his Food Queen, courting her with shrimp and wiener.”

  At the mention of the word wiener, Eli’s eyes bug out from under his cowboy hat, and he grabs his side like he’s just been shot in the ribs or something. Then he falls off his chair. “Wiener!” he shrieks from the floor, where he’s writhing around like crazy. “Jake said ‘wiener’!”

  The aforementioned wiener is a cocktail wiener. Technically, 144 cocktail wieners. That’s the other problem with the Food King. His food comes in bulk, usually a gross of some kind of party food—12 dozen stuffed mushroom caps, 12 dozen crab cakes, or 12 dozen mini-pizzas—appetizers we turn into dinners by eating lots and lots of them.

  “Ask His Heinie if he’ll give us ice-cream sandwiches next time,” Jake says.

  “Yeah,” says Eli. “Ice-cream sandwiches from his heinie, get it?”

  At which point our mom morphs back into her terminal illness self. “Enough,” she says, dead serious. “Enough of this heinie talk.”

  Eli climbs back into his chair, and we all lower our eyes and pick at our shrimp cocktail. A split second later, Eli and Jake burst out laughing.

  “What?” she says. “What’s so funny?”

  Eli falls on the floor again. “You said …” He can’t get the words out. He squirms around like he’s dying. Jake acts innocent.

  My mom looks to me to explain.

  “You said ‘heinie,'” I say. “It sounds funny when you say it.”

  She smiles. Then her shoulders shake. Then she starts laughing. She’s one of those people who laugh until they cry, who quiets down then gets started up all over again. She’s also the kind of person who looks pretty when she laughs, pretty in a Mom kind of way, pretty and maybe not secretly on the verge of death after all.

  After dinner my mom’s putting the dishes in the dishwasher, Eli’s out in the front with Tonto, and I’m sitting on the couch watching the Pirates suck. It’s the bottom of the eighth, the Pirates are down by two, and Pokey Reese is on deck when Jake comes in.

  “Hey look, Toby.” He points at the TV, which is showing a commercial where an old guy in a tie and a short-sleeved business shirt is combing Just for Men through his hair. “You should ask Mom to buy some of that stuff for you.”

  I don’t tell Jake that I already secretly bought some Just for Men at the drugstore a couple of weeks ago, which meant I couldn’t bid on a ‘75 Matty Alou on eBay. And that it didn’t do anything except make my gray hairs look sort of orangish, until the next time I washed my hair, and it all came out in the shower. Instead, I throw a pillow at Jake, which misses him because
he ducks just in time and it hits a lamp. Mom comes in and tells us to go outside and find a more appropriate way to burn off our testosterone.

  I’m still zipping my sweatshirt up by the time Jake’s out the door. I yell at him to wait up.

  “Hey,” says Eli as he sees Jake crossing the front yard. “Where are you guys going?”

  Jake cocks his head toward the highway.

  “Can I come?” says Eli.

  Jake puts his hand on Eli’s shoulder. “They don’t allow horses over there,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” says Eli, stroking Tonto’s mane. “We have work to do around the ranch.”

  Jake pats Eli on the head and takes off. I yell at him to wait up again. He looks over his shoulder at me, but he doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t speed up, either, so I run till I catch up with him. “Whadya wanna do?” I say.

  He’s got his headphones on, so I tap him on the shoulder. I look at him from the side and decide that my mom is right, that Jake does look like Josh Hartnett. He’s got shaggy brown hair that always looks perfectly messed up, crinkly eyes that practically disappear when he laughs, and a potential future manly man’s jawline. He doesn’t notice me tapping him on the shoulder, so I lift one headphone away from his ear.

  “Whadya wanna do?” This time I say it loud enough so he can hear me through the music.

  “What?” he says.

  Obviously, it wasn’t loud enough. “Wanna play Werewolf?” I’m practically shouting.

  Werewolf is this game Jake invented back when we lived in the old house. The kid who’s the werewolf chases all the other kids around in the dark until everybody is either home-free behind the McMullens’garage or captured by the werewolf. Jake was always the werewolf on account of him being an expert at coming up with ways to ambush people, like jumping down out of the Nevilles’peach tree or off the roof of the McMullens’toolshed. And I was pretty much always the last one to get caught, on account of me being an expert watcher. Even in the dark, I knew, from the clinking of the chain, when someone bumped into the Dawsons’swing set or from the shushing of branches, when someone was cutting through Mrs. Dunaway’s bushes on their way to make a break for home.

  Jake and I, we were untouchable at Werewolf—until our dad left, and we moved, and Jake got all cool and uninterested in things he considered immature, which is pretty much everything we did at the old house.

  “Werewolf,” I say. “One on one.”

  I wait for him to mock me. Or squeeze my neck till I cry uncle. Or maybe even just completely ignore me. But he actually says okay. Which makes me think that maybe, at least for the time being, he’s the old Jake after all.

  We decide that home base is the bench in ye olde village green, which is actually just this plot of crab-grass in the middle of Colonial Mews. Then Jake, who’s automatically the werewolf without us even discussing it, counts to 100 while I hide.

  There aren’t nearly as many good hiding places at Colonial Mews as there were at the old house, but I find ways to keep on the move, crouching behind bushes and dodging behind parked cars, ducking under streetlights and creeping through the little AstroTurf backyards some people have here. After about ten minutes or so I decide that I’ve gotten better than ever at Werewolf.

  But after about fifteen minutes I decide that maybe Jake’s gotten bored and walked over to the mall.

  Which makes me go from feeling like the James Bond of Colonial Mews, to feeling like some kind of overgrown psycho-toddler loser. The only way to know for sure is to make a break for ye olde village green.

  I peek out from the laundry room doorway where I’m hiding, sprint across the grass, then slip behind the Dumpster, Mission Impossible style. Then I twist the toe of my sneaker into the grass—better traction, like Jake taught me—ready to put on the final burst of speed toward ye olde bench when I feel this incredible whack between my shoulder blades.

  The air flies out of my lungs in a whoosh, and the next thing I know Jake’s on top of me, and I’m on the ground with my face in the dirt and my legs churning up the grass like one of those jackrabbits on the Nature Channel whose legs keep running even though he’s already being eaten by a cheetah.

  Jake pins me within a matter of seconds.

  “Give in, Dillweed?”

  Dillweed is Jake’s favorite insult for me. Back in her cooking days, our mom had a spice called dillweed which Jake said was named after me. I pretend that I hated being called Dillweed, but to tell you the truth, I actually sort of liked it since he never calls anyone else Dillweed and since he never calls me Dillweed in front of anyone else.

  “Nope.” I grit my teeth. “Never!”

  Jake shoves my head under his armpit. But I break free, roll over, and get in position to use the Crazy Leg, this wrestling move when you straddle the person and squeeze his legs between your knees.

  Jake begs for mercy. I tighten my grip. He promises to take out the garbage when it’s my night. He promises to let me borrow his Discman. But I tighten up even more until he’s squirming and yelping, squirming and laughing, ripping handfuls of grass put of the ground and throwing them in the air at me.

  I let up a minute, just to show a little mercy, since this is a historic event, this being the first time on record that I’ve ever pinned him. “How’d you catch me?” I say. “Where were you hiding?”

  Jake cocks his elbow to point toward the Dumpster.

  “You jumped off the Dumpster?”

  Jake smiles; the Dumpster move is one of his best ever.

  It’s right about then that we notice Andy Timmons standing there watching us. Andy Timmons—this kid who has an actual goatee and who hangs out in the parking lot before school smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and who everyone knows is a drug dealer—is standing in ye olde village green, holding a bottle of some kind of whisky. “How cute,” he says. “A little brotherly love.”

  Jake pushes me off him and gets up. Then he puts his arm around Andy Timmons’s shoulders and starts walking away.

  I jump up and trot along after them. I remind myself of Harriet the Horrible, who even when you were done playing with her kept trying to give you her slobbery ball, but I don’t know exactly what else to do.

  I run ahead and grab the hose next to the Dumpster.

  “Wanna drink?” I say. To Jake, not AndyTimmons.

  Jake doesn’t answer. He takes the bottle from Andy Timmons and drinks it down almost to the bottom. Then he grabs the hose and wets down his hair. He swings his head back and his hair sticks up like a rock star.

  “Now whadya wanna do?” I say.

  Jake looks sideways at Andy Timmons. Whatever it is he’s going to do, it doesn’t include me. He drops the hose and walks to the curb with Andy Timmons.

  I pick up the hose and wrap it up, making perfect circles one inside the other, like I’m a soldier wrapping up the American flag, all serious, like the future of democracy depends on it. Jake turns back toward me.

  “Toby,” he yells over to me. “Tell Mom I’m going over to the park to shoot hoops.”

  He’s lying. I can tell because he’s being way too casual, like the time he convinced me to trade him my Cal Ripken for a Ricky Henderson. I also know he’s lying since whenever he tells my mom he’s “shooting hoops,” he comes in after she’s asleep and eats pretty much everything in the pantry, which I know from the videos Mr. Fontaine, the guidance counselor, shows during Freedom from Chemical Dependency Week, is one of the things people do when they’re high. What I don’t know is what you’re supposed to do when it’s your brother and not somebody in a video. What I do is clean everything up afterward so our mom doesn’t find out.

  “So, you’ll tell her?” he says.

  I go back to the job of wrapping up the hose.

  Jake hands the bottle back to Andy Timmons, then walks toward me. Andy Timmons comes along.

  “You were tough tonight, Toby,” Jake says, socking me on the shoulder. “You really got me with the Crazy Leg.”

&
nbsp; I go from frowning like a U. S. Marine to grinning like ye olde village idiot.

  A car horn honks from somewhere down the street. Andy Timmons asks Jake if he’s coming or not.

  Jake grabs hold of my arm. “You’ll tell her?”

  The horn honks again.

  Jake punches me again, hard this time. I jab him back, but my fist just plows through the air, because by then he’s already gone.

  When I get back home, my mom’s sitting at the table with our cat, Mr. Furry, curled up in the chair behind her. Mr. Furry’s technically a girl, although we didn’t know that back when we first got her. She’s also technically everyone’s cat, even though the only person she actually ever hangs out with is Eli, and who, if you ask me, is pretty lame and stuck-up as a pet. Especially compared to Harriet the Horrible, who at least was always glad to see you and who thumped her tail on you when she sat next to you on the couch, and who was a great pet, even if she did have bad breath.

  My mom’s back is toward me, but I can see she’s paying the bills, because the checkbook is in front of her with the numbers crossed out, scribbled over, and crossed out again. She moves one bill from the have-to-pay to the have-to-wait pile, sniffs, and blows her nose into a paper towel. Mr. Furry jumps off the chair and leaves, her tail in the air.

  I picture myself going in and putting my arm around my mom. Or at least getting her a tissue instead of a paper towel. Or maybe making her a baloney-and-mustard sandwich. Or just acting like everything’s okay, which maybe it would be if we just acted like it was. But instead I back out of the room.

  I also stop by the front door and check for a letter from my dad or a postcard like the one he sent us from California that had a picture of something called the Lonesome Pine—a supposedly famous tree on a beach in California, but without any Baywatch-type surfers or anything—and a message on the back saying how we’ll all be living out in sunny California as soon as he finds a job. He FedExed us a bunch of amazing presents the first Christmas, but no letters and no money since then. Ever since we moved, and my mom sold most of his stuff at a yard sale, there’s sort of an unspoken rule: we don’t speak about him.