the chain saw and the brush hog.” I looked down. His hands weren’t shaking so much today.
“I’ve got Clifton,” I said, but just then my dad came down to the road and said, “Clifton can help me with the hose.”
“I can help Gramps with the hose!” Clifton said. He made everything sound like an adventure. I guess we were all like that, once.
“I’m coming back to take you to the diner for dinner,” Tommy told him. “You want to drive the tractor?”
“Yes sir!” said Clifton.
“Not you, bud. Your aunt Mimi. You help Gramps with the hose.”
Quick as you could say Tom Miller just showed up, we had things happening all around us. My father came out with a box of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that my mother had made before she left for the hospital, and he hitched the brush hog to the back of the tractor. “Take your finger out of your mouth,” he said to Clifton, who put his hand behind his back, embarrassed. My father noticed Tom had a case of beer on the passenger seat of the truck, and he shook his head and said, “Don’t you be driving my tractor all lickered up,” and Tom said, “I’m never driving that tractor again,” and there was a noise from the back of the truck and it was only then that I saw there was a guy asleep back there, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a baseball cap covering his face.
“Who’s that?” I said, climbing up on the tractor and handing Clifton my book, which he held carefully in his small square fingers. Callie was doing a good job with him. Even my mother said so, and my aunt Ruth. It was the one thing they agreed on.
“Oh, hell, I almost forgot. We’ll wake him up when we get there. That’s Stevie. You’ll like him. Everybody likes Stevie.”
Tom was right; everybody did like Stevie, although Tommy was the only one who called him that. I wound up calling him Steven. “The woman makes me sound respectable,” he would say, his arm hooked around my neck. “The woman makes me sound dignified.”
The smoke woke him up that afternoon, smoke lying so low that it swamped the flat bed of the truck and killed my view of the valley, which from the tractor usually looked miniature, like the village Donald’s grandfather had for his HO train set. The truth was, the fires were never really that big a deal, but everyone acted as though they were, maybe because the fires they could fight and the flooding they couldn’t. You could put out flames but you couldn’t stop the water from running into Miller’s Valley when it wanted to. Twice the copter dragging its water bucket went over again, and both times, as soon as the sound started, Tom stood still and let his head drop down low, like he was waiting for it to be done. I didn’t say anything about that. I didn’t want to ruin this time we were having, which felt more or less like normal.
I dragged out a long line of brush with the tractor and Tom cut up some dead branches with the chain saw. Then we finished off the sandwiches, except for plain cheese, which no one really liked much, and balled up the wax paper into the empty slots in the beer carton. We were sitting on an old stone wall when there was a groan from the truck, and then the slow grinding metal sounds of someone standing in the truck bed and using it as a springboard to the ground.
“This’s my kid sister,” said Tom, mustard in his mustache.
“Good to meet you, kid sister,” Steven said, putting out his hand and looking straight into my eyes like he was trying to see what was inside my head. It was a good thing I was sitting down because if I’d been standing I would have staggered, maybe even fallen.
“That’s not love,” my aunt Ruth had said one day when we’d been watching The Guiding Light, nodding at the screen, where the blond nurse was kissing the blond doctor next to a sign that said SURGERY. You could see how red their lips were, like they were painted on.
Maybe she was right, although there was a part of me that wondered why she would think she knew anything about it. But whatever it was, I was in it, surrounded by smoke, just like that.