“So, no cheerleading I guess.” He sucked on his cigarette like it was oxygen. He had a skull tattooed on the back of his hand. Every time I looked at him something inside me felt jagged, like I’d swallowed a razor blade and just had to hold really still so it wouldn’t move around and slice my insides up.
“You should come see Clifton,” I said.
“I saw him.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, a couple days ago,” he said. “You were there. I brought him that thing, what was it?”
“That was two weeks ago. He’s your son. You should see him every day.”
He flipped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it with his heel. “Who died and made you God?” he said.
“What happened to you?” I said. I must have been crazy to ask that question, or really tired. Between work and studying and helping my father with the farm and looking after Clifton and looking after Ruth, I didn’t get that much sleep a lot of the time.
Tommy smiled then, but it was that kind of hard humorless smile that’s worse than no smile at all. “Little sister, you have no idea,” he said.
“Try me.”
It was like for a moment a mask was lifted and from his eyes shone the old Tommy, the piggyback-ride Tommy, the bring-me-a-tadpole-in-a-jar Tommy, and the razor sliced at my gut and he must have seen it. For the first time since he’d gotten out of that rattly car in front of the house he really looked at me like he saw me. I could feel a sweet-sour smell coming off him but I could see Tom in his eyes.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, Meems,” he said. He hadn’t called me that for a long time. He called me that again a week later after I got back to the slope where the tractor lay, its engine quiet now, the ambulance guys working with my father to get it off him. I saw the old Tommy again just for a minute, even through all that blood. “I really blew it this time, Meems,” he’d said, and he coughed, gagged, spit a big maroon clot onto the ice, and then passed out.
One day I came home from school and there was a strange car in the driveway, an Oldsmobile 88 with a faded blue paint job. It looked like an old-lady car, which was what it was. Mrs. Jansson’s mother had driven it for a few years and then had died suddenly of some heart thing. So it was a dead-old-lady car. And now it was mine.
“You deserve it for sure,” my father said, as though it was a brand-new convertible. But I didn’t care. I could get myself where I was going now. I couldn’t ever remember feeling so free.
“It will come in handy,” my mother said, by which she meant Tommy. She had an idea that I would be driving him around to doctor’s appointments so his leg could improve. They said in town that the doctors wanted to amputate, but my mother had crossed her arms across her shelf of a chest and said, “Not my Tom, you won’t.” They’d airlifted him to the big hospital and spent hours reattaching his leg where the skin had been split open and the bone splintered, and while they weren’t optimistic, over time the join had taken. My mother hardly slept at all for almost two months, first using her vacation time and staying with an old nursing school classmate who worked at the big hospital, later putting in her shifts at our hospital and then driving an hour north and sitting by Tommy’s bedside. Maybe she saw some of that old Tommy, too, as she sponge-bathed him. Or maybe she saw the Tommy I’d never even known, the baby she’d cradled, the small boy she’d chased around the yard.
“He’s going to need a lot of rehab,” she said at dinner, big blue thumbprints of tired under each eye, dishing out the packaged mac and cheese. There hadn’t been a whole lot of cooking since the accident. We’d eaten what I brought home from the diner on weekends, and sandwiches and canned soup during the week. Good thing my father wasn’t picky.
“Dear Mimi,” Donald wrote. “I hear your brother is doing a lot better. Tell him I said hi. I’m on the swim team so I don’t get home until late most nights so sorry this is so short. I’m