themselves, except maybe the fathers of the girls he dated. He was good-looking, LaRhonda was right about that, but it was more the vitality of him, like a combination of heat and light he gave off. Once I had to find him in the high school hallways, when I’d missed the bus and had no way of getting home, and all I had to do was look for a big clot of kids in front of the lockers. There he was, right at the center.
“Hey, corncob,” he’d said, not denying me like most teenage brothers would, and the girls in the group smiled stupidly. He’s even sweet to his sister, they were thinking. “She’s something, isn’t she?” he added, looking around, then making a pistol of his finger and pointing it at one of the guys: “Hey!” A brother warning. No boy had so much as looked at me twice at that point except to ask to copy my math homework, and Tommy in the high school hallway was acting as though I was hot stuff.
When my mother finally spit out the story, in fits and starts, fits being the right word because she was ready to have one, I could just see Tommy in a borrowed canoe, pushing the oars through the murky floodwaters as his biceps knotted and smoothed out along with the motion. By the time he got to the house the rain had slowed down and my parents were looking over the flood insurance policy, which my mother always kept in the top drawer of her bedside table. Tommy had steered the canoe right into the hallway and left it there while he went upstairs to sleep. In the morning the canoe was sitting on the hall runner, and the runner was sitting on about three inches of silt. If my mother had been a different sort of person she would have cried.
It probably wasn’t the best time for Tommy to say that he’d enlisted, no coffee, no breakfast, two dead cows listed over like spotted dirigibles in the middle of the road. “I joined the Marines,” he said as he and my father looped a length of chain around a cow and towed it off to the side of the barn with the truck.
“So he wasn’t really in the canoe when he told you?” I said.
“My God, Mary Margaret, what does that have to do with anything?” my mother said as she scrubbed at the dirt on her lower kitchen cabinets and tossed me a sponge.
No one actually handled it particularly well, except for me because I knew to keep quiet. The worst was when Tommy came in from a trip to the barn, tracked mud into the back room that my mother had just finished mopping, and said, “Aunt Ruth says she’s thinks it’s a patriotic thing to do.” My mother dropped the mop so it made a sound like a gunshot when it hit the floor and went right out the back door even though it was still slick mud out there and she was wearing sneakers with a hole in the toe.
“Oh, Tommy,” I said.
“Come on, now, Miriam,” my father called out the door. You could hear my mother yelling as clear as the sky, which to mock us all had turned sweet baby blue with a big hot yellow ball of sun overhead, like it was saying, Rain? What rain?
“Remind me again how many children you’ve raised, Ruth,” my mother yelled.
What sounded like silence was probably Aunt Ruth replying in a normal tone of voice, but it didn’t last very long so she probably didn’t get to finish her sentence.
“Let me remind you of how I come by my opinions on this,” my mother continued. “I am the mother of these children and if you want to offer your opinions on how they ought to be raised and how they ought to behave then you can do it from somewhere else than the house you live in on my property, on my charity—”
“Oh, man,” Tommy said.
“Son, I should beat you with a stick,” my father said.
“I’d like to see you try,” Tommy yelled, and then there were two yelling fights going on until Tommy stomped out of the house and my mother slammed the door of Ruth’s house and they met in the middle of the gravel drive and walked past each other like they were strangers, or invisible.
“I need milk,” cried my aunt Ruth out the window, making me wonder