“Bet it’s just the lever,” Susannah says. “Probably not the gearbox or the whole thing would’ve frozen up. I bet you got a piece of plastic that fell down in there somewhere.”
“Is this like that thing people do during the Olympics, where suddenly they’re experts in curling or whatever?” I ask. “Or do you actually know what you’re talking about?”
Susannah snorts. “If I had a dime for every time some guy asked me that—”
“You’d have a dime-ond mine,” I say.
“That’s terrible,” Susannah says. “I mean, like legitimately so bad it’s almost good.”
We sit quietly for a minute, wrapped in our own thoughts. As mine have done recently, they float toward Marisa. Having makeup sex with her in my office closet was insane, even a little disturbing—what if we’d been caught?—but I can’t deny how even the thought of it makes my pulse quicken, sends a surge through my spine. But I don’t want to talk about her with Susannah, who would latch on to her and suck all the joy and newness out of … what do Marisa and I have? Is this a relationship? It’s been a sufficiently long time since I have seriously dated anyone that I’m hesitant to use that word, and it’s early days yet, but what else would I call it? Not that I’m going to bring this up with my sister—if I mention Marisa at all, Susannah will sense my hesitation and pounce. Hell, she might pick up on my thoughts about Marisa through some sort of telepathic osmosis.
I shouldn’t worry, because in true Susannah fashion, without any preamble, she says out of the blue, “You know what I was always jealous about with you and Frankie?”
“Our fly fashion sense?” I reply.
“All the errands you both used to run for Uncle Gavin,” she says. “Y’all were out on the street having adventures and doing all this secret brotherhood shit, and I was stuck at the house with Fay.”
“Fay took you to the aquarium and the World of Coke,” I say. “She didn’t exactly chain you to a radiator and make you fold laundry for hours.”
“Yeah, but she was a pain in my ass.” Susannah is slumped low in her seat, legs spread wide and feet flat on the floor.
“Remember when Fay took us all to see The King and I and wanted to make a special night of it? You brought your friend Ashley and snuck in vodka for your Diet Cokes. She threw up all over the front of my shirt at intermission.”
Half of Susannah’s mouth quirks up in a smile. “Ashley couldn’t hold her liquor,” she said.
“Fay talked about going to see that play for weeks. And that’s the night you pulled that stunt. We had to leave in the middle of the play. And that same night, Fay left. She walked out on our uncle after eight years together.” Because of you, I almost add, but I don’t. I don’t need to.
What I most vividly recall from that evening was the fight Uncle Gavin and Fay had when we got home, what they said about Susannah.
“She’s cruel, Gavin,” Fay said. “She likes being cruel. You saw what she did to her friend tonight. I bet she planned this out from the start, you know? Making Ashley her friend and then ruining it. Ruining her. That’s what she does, Gavin. She knew that the one thing I wanted to do tonight was go enjoy a play and at least pretend we are some sort of functioning family, and she fucking ruined it!”
My uncle, with an almost infuriating calm, said, “She doesn’t want you to do anything kind for her. She’ll take that and turn it around on you like a knife.”
“Do you not realize how fucked up that is?”
“She’s in pain.”
“So am I!” Fay shouted.
My uncle did not move or offer any sort of reconciliatory gesture. He simply said, “She’s my sister’s child, Fay.”
The sheen in Fay’s eyes broke, and angrily she wiped away her tears. “Well, she’s not mine,” she said. She stalked across the room toward the front door. When she was about to pass me on the couch, she stopped. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, then bent forward and pressed her lips to my forehead. I closed my eyes to receive that kiss, drinking in the coconut scent of her hair. Then Fay stood and walked past Uncle Gavin and out the door, slamming it shut behind her.
Now, as we sit in the customer lounge of the Toyota garage, Susannah glances at me, then looks toward the TV, where Mama Bone, the leader of the urban dog rescuers, is trying to coax a pit bull out from behind a dumpster. “I actually do feel bad about that,” Susannah says.
“Better late than never, I guess,” I say.
“Fuck you, Ethan.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you want me to be proud of you for actually feeling guilty?” I’m mad now, but some detached part of me registers how quickly this escalated, how we are at each other’s throats.
But then Susannah looks at me, and while she’s still slumped in her seat, her glance is searing. “I hated that Fay tried to be our mother,” she says, her voice low and almost even. “I was a horrible bitch to her, and I’m sorry. But Mom died, Ethan. Basically in front of us. Dad too.”
It takes me a moment to find my voice. “I know,” I say.
Susannah turns back to face the TV. “I resented her,” she says.
After a moment when she doesn’t say anything else, I say, “I mean, I get why you resented her. We didn’t know her, didn’t even really know Uncle Gavin either, and she steps in and—”
Susannah shakes her head. “I resented Mom,” she says, and that hits me like a baseball bat to the chest. “And you can’t resent your mother because some asshole killed her,” she continues, still looking at the TV. “So I took it out on Fay.”
At our parents’ funeral, I sat in the front pew with Uncle Gavin and Fay on one side of me, Susannah on the other, and I remember that even in the fog of my grief, I realized Susannah was just staring at the floor the entire service—glaring at it, really, as if concentrating all her anger onto it. She had refused to sit next to Fay, refused to receive mourners at the reception even though she could sit in a chair because of her injuries. And I remember being vaguely pissed off about it but just writing her behavior off as another example of Susannah being an angry bitch. I’d been wrapped up in my own misery and hadn’t left room to think about my sister. Surrounded by mourners, many of whom spoke words of kindness and sympathy—your mother was so wonderful, she’s in a better place, your father is still watching over you—I remember feeling utterly alone. I hadn’t even considered what Susannah might be feeling, how her grief might look very different from mine.
I’m sufficiently stunned by all of this that I don’t say anything for a while, and Susannah and I sit in silence, not even registering the TV anymore.
“It wasn’t very adventurous,” I finally say. Susannah turns her head slowly and raises an eyebrow. “Me and Frankie,” I say. “That summer. Mostly we just hand-delivered envelopes to people.”
Susannah doesn’t say anything for a minute, then decides to accept my comment for the half-assed olive branch that it is. “What people?” she asks.
“All kinds,” I say. “I remember the first one was Johnny Shaw.”
“Uncle Gavin’s lawyer?”
I nod. “Had this goon in his office, big guy with a shaved head and no neck, wore a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. Tried to scare us.”
“Did it work?”
“He wanted to know our names, so I told him mine was Ernest Hemingway. He said, ‘Okay, Mr. Hemingway, you can just leave that envelope with me.’”
Susannah laughs now, bright and startling in the customer lounge. The three kids watching Mama Bone jerk their heads to look at Susannah before slowly returning their gaze to the TV. A man peering at a magazine looks over at us, then goes back to reading. I don’t care. It feels good to make Susannah laugh.
“Okay, so what else did you and Frankie do?” she asks.
“That’s pretty much it: delivered stuff to people. A diner on Crescent, sometimes. A shoe store in Underground. Once a lady working at the passport service desk in the post office.”
“Blank passports, I bet,�
�� she says. “So, when did you figure it out?”
“About the blank passports?”
“That Uncle Gavin is what he is.”
I pretend to think about her question. I’m really stalling. This isn’t a conversation I’ve ever had, with anyone. My walls are going up, portcullises dropping, searchlights sweeping back and forth over barbed wire. At the same time, though, I feel … relief, I guess. A potential unburdening. I’ve carried around my uncle’s secrets—some of them, anyway; not all of them, never all—for years, like a heavy pack I’ve gotten used to and would only notice when I shed its weight off my back.
“That first summer,” I say.
Susannah makes a dismissive pff. “I guessed that. You’re slow, not stupid.”
“Thanks?”
“Seriously, what made you figure it out?”
All the deliveries, I want to say. Me and Frankie being Uncle Gavin’s messenger boys. But that wasn’t it, not really.
“Brandon Cargill,” I say to her.
Her eyes widen with understanding. “I know who he is. He would come by Ronan’s after—” She hesitates for only a second. “After you left, for college. What happened with him?”
Part of me wants to acknowledge that pause of hers, all the unsaid things loaded into that brief moment. Another part of me wishes I had a drink—a cold beer, maybe a double bourbon. Instead I sigh, and then I tell her.
* * *
BRANDON CARGILL WORKED out of a garage west of downtown, in an industrial strip sandwiched between the interstate on one side and the neighborhoods of English Avenue and Vine City on the other. Low brick buildings and warehouses alternated with patches of scrubby fields bordered by rusting chain-link fences, the downtown skyscrapers rising on the periphery like sentinel towers. Clusters of power lines strung from poles crisscrossed overhead, a net to keep a boundary on the sky. There were no tourists there, no strolling shoppers, no parks or restaurants. The area had all the charm and functionality of a manhole cover.
ATL Body Shop was a long, white garage with several bays, each with its own pull-down door. Most of the doors were up, revealing cars in various stages of repair. Frankie’s father Ruben drove us there—which was unusual, because Frankie and I usually walked or took MARTA when we made our deliveries—and he pulled to the curb, then gestured at the garage as if to say, Here’s your stop; get out and be quick.
“You’re not coming?” Frankie said to his father.
Ruben shook his head. “I’ll be right here,” he said. I realized he hadn’t turned the engine off. Again he waved his hand at the garage. “Apúrate. And remember—don’t give him that envelope until he gives you one.” That was another odd thing—we were exchanging envelopes, not just delivering them.
We stepped out of Ruben’s car and crossed the concrete parking lot, wincing at the heat that slapped us, at the air we drew into our lungs like dragon’s breath, leaving an aftertaste of gasoline and hot rubber. An old maroon Honda Accord, its rear windshield starred and cracked, sat in front of an open bay as if abandoned, or simply too exhausted to roll forward into the shade of the bay.
I elbowed Frankie, and when he looked at me, I nodded at the Honda. “Think you could fix that?” I asked.
Frankie glanced at the Honda. “Not worth my time, man,” he said. “Piece-of-crap purple rice burner from the Nineties—”
There was a loud, explosive crash from the garage ahead that sounded like someone had hurled a metal trash can into an empty dumpster. We froze. Standing in the doorway of the nearest bay was a tall, rawboned man in stained coveralls, a backward Atlanta Braves cap on his head. He held a drop-forged wrench in one hand. It took me a moment to realize he had swung the wrench and struck the side of the garage with it, resulting in that horrible echoing crash.
“You talking about my car?” the man said.
Frankie didn’t falter. He beamed a smile bright as the sun. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Shut the fuck up, Chachi,” the man said. Frankie’s smile vanished, a total eclipse. The tall rawboned man pointed at me with his wrench. “What you want, kid?”
I glanced at Frankie, then back to the man. “I’m looking for Brandon Cargill.”
The rawboned man clenched his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “Brad,” he said.
I blinked. “What?” I said.
“It’s Brad, motherfucker,” he said. He swung the wrench so it banged off the side of the garage, the crash shivering in the air. “Who sent you?”
I glanced at Frankie to get his reaction. What the hell? But the man banged the wrench once more. “Don’t look at the spic, look at me when I’m talking to you,” he said. “Who the fuck sent you?”
I’d heard racist speech and jokes before, but I’d never been confronted by an adult who used such speech so openly. I gaped at the man, who pointed at me again with the wrench. “Who the fuck sent you?”
“Gavin Lester,” I said.
The man raised his wrench and threw it. Frankie and I ducked involuntarily. The wrench spun end over end between us and smashed through the windshield of the maroon Honda. Safety glass bounced off my jeans. Before I could move or put my hands up or even breathe, the man was in front of me, close enough that I could see an almost translucent mole on his jaw, just below his left ear.
“The fuck does he want?” the man said. “Shut up,” he added as I opened my mouth. “I know what the fuck he wants. You tell him Brad Cargill needs his first.”
Frankie held up the manila envelope. Quietly, he said, “I think this is what you want, Mr. Cargill.”
Cargill whipped his head around to stare at Frankie, who stood his ground, looking straight back at him, the envelope held between them like a flag of truce. At that moment, I realized Cargill was just wrong. He was a stupid, loud kind of wrong, the kind of wrong that would blow his nose in his hand and then wipe it on your shirt with a sneer. The kind that would, with malice and intent, call a Latino teenager a spic, then chuck a heavy wrench through a windshield to make a point. The kind that would walk into your house one evening and blow your life away.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Cargill pointedly looked away from Frankie to me, his eyes round with outrage. “You know who the fuck I am?” he said.
I fought to keep my voice level and mostly succeeded. “You’re the gentleman who gets this envelope. Once you give us what my uncle needs.”
Cargill worked his jaw as if trying out a few words silently, getting the shape of them in his mouth, before discarding them. “What did you say?” he finally said.
“You’re the gentleman—”
He cut me off with a chopping motion of his hand. “About your uncle,” he said.
“Gavin Lester,” I said. “He’s my uncle.”
Something seemed to melt away from Cargill then, as if he had shrugged off a coat and left it on the ground. He smiled, revealing a discolored eyetooth. “I’m sorry,” Cargill said, and his soft voice, almost a croon, caused my back to crawl like a bag full of live bait. “I just lose my temper sometimes, is all. So Gavin Lester’s your uncle, huh?”
I nodded, not trusting myself enough to speak.
Cargill chuckled, then reached out a hand like a spider and ruffled my hair with it. “Gavin Lester’s nephew,” he said. “Jesus. Well, all right, Gavin Lester’s nephew, let’s have that envelope.”
I looked past that smile at the pale, flat eyes set back into his skull. “Yours first. Sir.”
Something shifted in Cargill’s face then, like a snake coiling. Then he snickered and clapped me on the shoulder so that I nearly stumbled. “Damn, you got a brass set on you,” he said. “Okay, okay.” Cargill rubbed his nose, then dipped his hand into a coverall pocket and pulled out a fat, crinkled envelope, the kind you’d put a letter in, except this one wasn’t big enough to hold whatever was in it. It looked like someone had shoved a paperback in it and tried to lick it shut.
“Let’s make sure it’s all here, shall we,” Cargill sai
d, tearing open the flap. He pulled out a wad of bills, the kind with Benjamin Franklin on them. Cargill began counting aloud by hundreds, thumbing through the bills, but his eyes kept returning to me, a ghost of a grin dancing around his mouth. When he ran out of bills at ten thousand, he pushed the stack back into the now-ruined envelope and handed it to me. I took the envelope and held it with both hands. Ten thousand dollars. Jesus.
“Thank you,” I managed.
Cargill reached out and put a finger on my forehead like he was pressing an elevator button. “Not so fast,” he said. He removed his finger. “You and your amigo have something for me.”
Dumbly, I nodded and looked at Frankie, who stepped forward and handed his envelope to Cargill, who plucked it so quickly out of Frankie’s hand that Frankie blinked in surprise. Cargill hooted with laughter. “Gracias,” he said with a wink, pronouncing the word grassy ass. “Y’all tell Uncle Gavin that Brad Cargill appreciates it. Be seein’ you again, prob’ly.” He mock saluted us. “Hasta la vista, baby,” he said. His laughter rose behind us like a flight of crows as we turned and walked back across the broken concrete to the curb, where Frankie’s father was waiting for us, beyond the maroon Honda with the shattered windshield.
* * *
“HE SOUNDS LIKE a piece of work,” Susannah says.
“It’s like he was God’s first try at a human,” I say, causing Susannah to laugh again. “But he was seriously scary. Frankie said he was straight-up evil.”
Instantly I regret mentioning Frankie. Guilt washes over me like a tide. But Susannah doesn’t say anything at first, just plays with the laces on her Doc Martens.
“I didn’t go see him, either,” she says. “I left and didn’t write him a note or anything for almost two years, just sort of assumed you would go see him. Which wasn’t fair to you.”
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