going to one of the University of California colleges but I don’t know which one yet. You will be the first person I tell when I know.”
When I took some brownies I’d made back to her place, my aunt Ruth said with her mouth full, “And to think, your brother made it through the service just fine and almost gets himself killed on your father’s tractor.”
“I don’t know how you can say he made it through the service just fine,” I said.
“Well, he’s still alive, isn’t he? Lots of those boys aren’t. He’s still alive and he’s got all his limbs and his faculties.”
“Never mind,” I said. I was losing patience with Aunt Ruth’s certainty about the things she thought. It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.
People said Tommy made a miraculous recovery, which is to say that even with a cast and crutches he was soon showing up at the Rusty Hammer with a woman on either side of him, soon promising my mother he would come to Sunday dinner and then not showing up while the roast curled hard and dark around the edges in a warm oven. To tell the truth, I think that’s another reason why my mother kept pushing for Callie and Clifton to move to the farm, to reel Tommy back in, although he was just as likely to blow off a visit with Clifton as a Sunday dinner.
Once he got pulled in for a drunk and disorderly and my father went and got him and let him sleep it off on the couch. The second time the cops called, my father said, “He’s all yours.” The police let him out anyway, because he was a veteran, because they’d known him in high school, because he was Tommy and sat in the little holding cell and got them laughing, even changed as he was.
I never drove him in my new car to the doctor after all; he never even saw the inside of my new car. When he went to the rehab facility, I guess he had some girl drive him, and my mother complained that he’d stopped going long before he ought to. LaRhonda rode in my car a few times when hers was in the shop; she was always driving over the curb on Front Street or backing into a tree. At the body shop where Tom had worked, briefly, I heard the guys called her car the cash cow. I could tell she wasn’t enthusiastic about my old sedan. “I’m praying on your brother,” she said one day, touching up her blush in the rearview, and it reminded me of why we weren’t really friends anymore.
She’d given me a small box of books that day because, she said, she was putting away the things of the flesh, although it seemed kind of insulting that it was all right for the things of the flesh to wind up with me and I noticed she’d left out Forever Amber, that we’d read together in her bathroom when we were both twelve. Instead there was a book about cowgirls called Giddyap! that was pretty much all sex scenes except that the sex seemed ridiculous if you knew anything about what it would feel like to lie on the floor of a barn with no clothes on. There was a book called Human Sexual Response that was creepy because it took some of the stuff from the cowgirls book and turned it into science, with black-and-white drawings. And there was a really sad book about a bunch of college girls who thought they were going to be someone and then just turned out to be married and unhappy. There was one good sex scene in that one, though. The book was called The Group and it was the only one I wanted to keep, but I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the others. They felt like boomerangs, that would somehow find their way back to me and, more important, to my mother’s attention.
I stashed them behind the dolls Cissy had made for me over the years, even though I’d never been much of a doll girl, but then I thought better of it. My mother was always taking the dolls down from the shelf and batting them against the wall to shake the dust loose because my mother felt about dust the way the evangelicals