by L. N. Cronk
The Other Brother
Book 4
in the Chop, Chop Series
by
L.N. Cronk
Published by Rivulet Publishing
Kindle Edition
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Cover Photography by Konstantin Inozemtsev.
Spanish translations provided by Vicki Oliver Krueger.
Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984
by International Bible Society.
Used by permission of Zondervan.
All rights reserved.
For Becky, Dargan, Deacon, Jenna, Kyle, Lee, and Oisìn.
For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. - 1 Timothy 4:8
~ ~ ~
I’VE KNOWN CHARLOTTE ever since she was a toddler – when she and her brother, Greg, first moved into town. I was twelve years old at the time and Greg quickly became my best friend – so she’s been like a little sister to me for a long time.
As a matter of fact, she and her mom are like family to me. This has always been true – ever since I’ve known them.
But it’s been especially true since Greg and their dad died.
And Charlotte’s been through a lot (I guess we both have), so I’ve always tried to be there for her . . . like a big brother would be.
Don’t get me wrong – I’d never try to take Greg’s place.
But I guess you could say that I’m her other brother.
I guess you could also say that’s why I was lugging what seemed like everything Charlotte had ever owned up five flights of stairs. It was freshman move-in day at State, and of course I’d agreed to help. Her mom and Tanner were helping too, and we’d all soon realized that it was going to be a whole lot quicker to take the stairs than to wait in line for one of the two ancient elevators that serviced Charlotte’s dorm.
I set a box down and looked around her crowded little room, wondering where in the world she was going to put everything. Tanner barged in, showing off by carrying a large box on each shoulder.
Tanner was a lot like a brother to Charlotte too. Of course he wasn’t as close to her as I was, but he was practically her brother-in-law. His youngest brother, Jordan, was dating Charlotte and, although they hadn’t been going out all that long, it was pretty much a given that one day they’d get married.
“What’s that?” I asked Tanner, pointing to one of the boxes. “Her lead-weight collection?”
“Probably,” he said, not laughing as he set one box down and then the other.
“Everything okay?” I asked. He’d been unusually quiet all day.
“Yup,” he said, heading back out for another load before I could question him any further.
I headed out the door after him, figuring he was just missing Jordan more than he’d anticipated. A week earlier Jordan had boarded a plane for Texas where he’d received a full baseball scholarship. If he hadn’t gotten that scholarship, he’d be going to State too, right here with Charlotte.
Charlotte hugged Tanner goodbye first, then turned to me.
“You be careful!” I told her.
“Yes, Father,” she said, bowing her head contritely.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You need to stay focused on why you’re here and put the ax to the grind stone.”
“Put the ax to the grind stone?” she asked. “Who says that?”
“People say that,” I told her.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Honestly, what century were you born in?”
“Same one as you, dearie.”
“You’d never know it,” she muttered, but then she looked at me seriously. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna screw up.”
During her junior year in high school – just before she’d started dating Jordan – Charlotte had gotten pregnant. She’d had the baby, put it up for adoption, graduated second in her class, and managed to salvage her relationship with Jordan, but it hadn’t been an easy time – for any of us. I knew she still felt bad about what everyone had gone through because of it.
“I know you’re not gonna screw up,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. Just . . . just be careful. I worry about you.”
“Okay,” she nodded, giving me a tight hug.
She turned to her mom who was already wiping away a tear.
“I’m coming home in a week, Mom!”
“I know,” Mrs. White said. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not the one who went to school in Texas,” she said. “You people would be a real mess!”
“I love you.” Mrs. White gave her one last hug.
“I love you too,” Charlotte said, and we got in Tanner’s truck and pulled away.
“I think she was a little teary there herself,” I remarked and Mrs. White nodded.
“How long do you think it’ll be before she calls?” I asked.
“Five minutes,” Mrs. White said.
“I think three.”
“Ten,” Tanner guessed. “She’s gonna call Jordan first.”
“This is probably true,” I agreed. “It’s been a whole forty minutes since she talked to him.”
“She talked to him about five times on the ride up here,” Mrs. White said. They’d ridden separately in Charlotte’s car so she’d have a vehicle at school to get around in.
“How’s he liking things down there so far?” I asked Tanner.
“Okay, I guess,” he said, shrugging.
“Is everything all right?” Mrs. White asked. Apparently she’d also noticed that he wasn’t acting like himself.
“Oh, yeah,” he said nonchalantly. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“You didn’t have to spend your day doing this,” Mrs. White said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no, no. I’m fine,” Tanner said. “I just . . . I just didn’t sleep good last night. I’m fine.”
Mrs. White’s phone rang.
“Two minutes,” I said, looking at my watch. “I win.”
Two hours later, we dropped Mrs. White off and then Tanner drove me to my house. He turned into the driveway and then surprised me by shutting the motor off.
“You wanna come in?” I asked. “Laci’s probably got dinner ready and I’m sure she’d be glad to–”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Well, all right. I guess I’ll see you later then.” I reached for the door handle.
“Wait.”
I let go of the handle and looked at him.
“I need to talk to you about something.”
“What?” I asked, figuring he had great plans for a hunting trip or something rolling around in his head.
“Um . . . I’ve kinda got some bad news.”
That’s when I realized that he’d said he needed to talk with me . . . not that he wanted to talk with me. That’s also when I realized I was about to find out why he’d been so quiet all day.
“What?”
“Chase came to see me and mom the other day,” Tanner said. Chase was Tanner and Jordan’s middle brother. He lived about five hours away in Chicago, and he hardly ever came home exc
ept for holidays.
“Chase?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?”
“He’s um . . . he’s sick.”
“He’s sick?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
Tanner hesitated for a moment.
“Ever heard of Huntington’s disease?” he finally asked.
Huntington’s disease . . . Huntington’s disease. I guess maybe I’d heard of it, but I certainly couldn’t tell you the first thing about it.
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Not really.”
“It’s a degenerative, neurological disease. It kind of affects everything in the brain . . . movement, like Parkinson’s does and mental abilities and emotions . . .”
We both knew a bit about Parkinson’s because Natalie’s dad had it. Natalie was Tanner’s girlfriend and one of Laci’s best friends. Her dad had been getting worse lately . . . as a matter of fact, Natalie had just moved back to Cavendish to help her mother take care of him.
“What do they do for it?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“Nothing much. There’s no cure.”
“You’re saying he’s going to die?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean they say you don’t die from it . . . you die from complications associated with it. But yeah, basically it’s fatal.”
“How long does he have?” I asked.
“They say between ten and twenty-five years. Probably closer to ten.”
“Wow. I’m really sorry.”
He nodded and stared straight ahead for a long time.
“Can I do anything?” I finally asked. It was a stupid question, I know, but what are you supposed to say?
He shook his head and kept staring ahead as an awkward silence began to grow. My thoughts started racing, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.
Pray? Well, obviously I was supposed to pray. But I mean, out loud? That’s not exactly something I usually did around Tanner. Okay, actually it wasn’t something I’d ever done around Tanner. I’d prayed with probably hundreds of strangers, no problem. But with Tanner? All I could do now was sit there like a coward and scold myself as the awkward silence grew.
“It’s genetic,” Tanner finally said quietly.
“What?”
“I said it’s genetic.”
Tenth grade biology . . . Punnet squares, dominant genes, probability. Yeah. I remembered all that stuff. So, Chase must have gotten one recessive gene from their mom and one recessive gene from their dad. But that meant there was a chance that Tanner had too . . . or Jordan.
Now I hardly noticed the silence in Tanner’s truck as my mind started calculating probabilities. There was a twenty-five percent chance that any one of them would get it and Chase was already diagnosed. So, the chance that any two of them would get it was only (only?) one in sixteen. All three of them? One in sixty-four.
“There’s a fifty percent chance that I’ll get it too,” Tanner said. “Or Jordan.”
“No, no, no,” I assured him, glad that my superior math skills were about to make him feel somewhat better. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance that you got one gene from your mom and a fifty-fifty chance that you got one from your dad. Right there, that’s only a twenty-five percent chance. Then, the chances that more than one of you–”
“That’s only for recessive genes,” Tanner interrupted. “This is an autosomal dominant gene.”
And that’s when I realized he knew a whole lot more about it than I did.
“Autosomal dominant?” I asked.
Tanner nodded and looked at me.
“Most lethal genes are recessive,” he agreed. “If they were dominant, whoever had them would die before they ever had a chance to pass them on.”
Lethal genes . . .
“But,” he went on, “Huntington’s isn’t like that since it doesn’t usually show up until middle age or so . . . after people’ve already had kids. Chase has early onset. It doesn’t usually show up this young.”
“Who gave it to Chase?” I asked.
“Not sure,” Tanner said. “Mom hasn’t shown any symptoms yet, but that doesn’t really mean anything – it can show up really late in life too. But I’m betting it was Dad. I think he found out he had it and couldn’t deal with it and that’s why he killed himself. Or, Danica says that a neurological disease like this can also cause psychological problems – depression and stuff – that could have made him suicidal. Either way, I’m thinking it’s why he did it.”
Danica was married to our good friend, Mike. He was a medical doctor. She was a psychiatrist.
“So Mike and Danica both know?”
“Yeah, and my mom. But nobody else needs to know right now, okay?”
“I’m not going to keep this from Laci.”
“Well, obviously,” he rolled his eyes.
“Does Natalie know?”
“Yeah.”
“What about Jordan?”
“No way,” Tanner said adamantly, shaking his head. “We’re not gonna tell him – at least not until he’s got his freshman year under his belt. He’s got enough on his mind right now without something like this ruining college for him. We might not even tell him until he graduates, if we can keep it from him. We’ll just have to see how bad Chase gets and how fast.”
I sat back in my seat, trying to process everything.
“Can’t they find out if you’ve got the gene or not?” I finally asked.
“Yeah,” Tanner nodded. “They can do genetic testing.”
“Are you gonna get tested?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Would you wanna find out?”
I barely had a chance to think about whether I would or not before he went on.
“I mean, if I test positive, it’s not like they can do anything about it. And they wouldn’t be able to tell me when I’m going to become symptomatic. Could be next year, could be forty years from now. Why not just enjoy life and not worry about it?”
“Aren’t you kinda gonna worry about it anyway?” I asked.
“Probably,” he admitted. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to get tested. I just said I don’t know yet. I haven’t really had a whole lot of time to wrap my mind around all this. It’s all happened kind of fast.”
I nodded and we lapsed into silence again.
My mind was swirling. Tanner (who was for all intents and purposes my best friend) was sitting here telling me that he could be dying. I found myself wondering just one thing.
Was he saved?
It was something I didn’t know. Something I’d wondered and worried about for years. Something Laci and I had prayed about. But not something I’d ever actually done anything about.
Talk to him, you coward! Offer to pray with him. Make sure he knows Jesus.
“Well, anyway. I just wanted to let you know,” Tanner said, breaking the silence.
“If I can do anything . . .” I said, again aware of how stupid that sounded.
“Thanks.” He nodded and tried to give me a smile.
“Listen, Tanner,” I said, trying to beat down the coward inside of me. “I want you to know that I’m going to be praying for you. Me and Laci, both.”
“Thanks,” he said again, smiling a little more successfully.
I gave him a smile back and opened my door.
“Don’t forget what I said though,” Tanner called as I stepped out of the car. “Jordan is not to find out about this right now!”
I nodded, slammed the door, and started toward the house, thinking about his last words – that he didn’t want Jordan to find out.
That meant that Charlotte couldn’t find out either.
~ ~ ~
WHILE LACI WAS getting the kids ready for bed that evening, I went into my office and did a quick search on Huntington’s Disease.
Early symptoms may include mood swings, depression, irritability . . . involuntary facial movements . . . trouble driving, difficulty learning n
ew things, remembering a fact, or making a decision . . . mild balance problems, clumsiness, and personality changes.
As the disease progresses, patients may have trouble feeding themselves and swallowing . . . experience sudden, jerky, and involuntary movements throughout their body, have severe problems with coordination and balance . . . hesitant, halting, or slurred speech . . . jerky, rapid eye movements . . . dementia.
The disease usually doesn’t manifest itself until middle age . . . disease progression is often more severe and may progress quicker in younger patients . . . young people who develop Huntington’s disease may have signs and symptoms that mimic Parkinson’s disease including: muscle rigidity, tremors, and slow movements . . . seizures may also occur in those with early-onset Huntington’s disease.
Death usually occurs ten to thirty years after symptoms first appeared . . . disease progression may occur faster in younger people.
After I’d brushed my teeth that night, I walked into our bedroom to find Laci sitting in bed, reading.
“You got a new Bible?” I asked.
She nodded.
“How come?”
She shrugged and looked down, but then she looked back up at me.
“I gave my other one to Tanner,” she said quietly.
“You what?”
Her “other one” was Greg’s old Bible. Mrs. White had given it to her after he’d died and I think it was Laci’s most valuable possession. If the house caught fire she’d save the kids, that Bible, me, and then the dog . . . in that order.
“I think he . . . he needs it more than I do right now,” she explained.
“So you already know?” I asked.
“Know what?”
I shook my head.
“Why did you give him your Bible?” I asked.
“I just . . . I just felt like he was really going through some stuff,” she said, “and I thought he should have it.”
“But he didn’t tell you what was going on?”