My Brother's Keeper (14 page)

I open the door and Mr. Furry trots inside.

I just look at the Food King.

He sort of shrugs. “Cats,” he says. “You have to make them flunk it was their idea.”

Then Eli hugs me, and calls me a cat rustler, and the Food King doesn’t say anything about him being the one who technically rustled Mr. Furry, and we all sit down to eat.

My mom asks Stanley if he’ll take a look at the screen door before he leaves.

“It probably just needs a little WD40,” he says.

My mom gets up to get soy sauce.

“Maybe sometime I’ll come over with some grass seed, once it finally warms up,” he calls out to her in the kitchen. “For that that spot out front where the bike left a bare patch.”

“Tonto,” says Eli.

“Beg your pardon?” says Stanley.

Eli climbs under the table to feed a noodle to Mr. Furry. Which means it’s just me and Stanley.

“Tonto,” I say. “The bike’s named Tonto.” I start out saying this with a totally straight face, but by the time I’m done, I’m smiling like ye olde village idiot. But the Food King just smiles at me.

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks for telling me that.”

T
hen we just eat, and he helps clear the table. When my mom says she doesn’t have any dessert, he says he’s got to get going anyhow.

My mom walks the Food King to the front door. I position myself so I can see if they hug or anything without them seeing me watching. But she just thanks him for the Chinese food and then he’s gone.

“Is he going to be our new dad?” Eli says this before the door is even totally closed.

My mom makes a face like this is a silly question.

“Stanley?” she says.

“I like him,” says Eli, who then walks out holding Mr. Furry in a death grip.

Which just leaves me and my mom standing in the kitchen.

“So what’s going on?” I say.

“With Stanley?”

I make a face like that’s a silly question. “With Jake.”

She motions for me to sit down at the table, then pulls out some of her herbal gum.

“The judge .'..” she says, “. .. gave him probation.”

Probation at school means you have to sit in the principal’s office during recess. I don’t exactly understand what it means when a judge says it.

“When he comes back.”

Now I really don’t understand.

“Is the judge going away?”

“No.” She puts her hand on mine. “Jake is.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Rehab.”

All of sudden I feel as mean and rotten and hateful as I did the night he took the Stargell. I pull my hand away.

“Doesn’t he have to go to jail?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t he have to pay anyone back?”

“You mean for the damage to the car and the mailboxes?”

I mean for the Stargell, too. “For everything.”

She looks confused. “Why are you so angry?”

“I don’t get it.” I get up and turn my back to her.

“What don’t you understand?”

I turn around. “Everything.”

She sighs and gets up to throw out her gum. “Well, we get to spend a day with him tomorrow before he goes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

I turn and stomp out, making as much noise as I possibly can pounding up the steps. Which is pretty stupid because I have absolutely no idea what to do once I get upstairs. Which I solve by grabbing a copy of Eli’s new
National Geographic for Kids
and going into the bathroom and sitting on the fuzzy green thing on the toilet and where I stay until I’m sure my mom and Eli have gone to sleep.

T
he next day when I wake up, I smell bacon. I look at the clock and see that it’s only ten o’clock, which is weird since my mom’s never up this early on a Saturday. What’s weirder is that our house smells like real food.

I come downstairs, still feeling mad, but also feeling embarrassed for how I acted last night. Especially when I see her mixing a bowl of scrambled eggs and all.

Until I see Jake sitting at the kitchen table. At which point all I feel is mad.

I don’t say hello or even let on that I notice that he’s there. “I’m going to Mr. D’s,” I say, purposely not looking at him.

“Not today,” my mom says. “Jake’s only here till dinner, and I want everyone home.”

I mentally try to figure out exactly how many minutes there are between now and six o’clock.

“Want some bacon and eggs?” she says.

“Nah,” I say. I walk past Jake toward the pantry to get some cereal. Except that there isn’t any. Which means I have to have eggs. “Okay,” I say. “I guess I’ll have some.”

I sit down, purposely not sitting next to Jake like I usually do. Which means I’m sitting right across from him. Which means I pretty much have to look at him. His face looks banged up and he looks smaller than he used to, smaller and pale and tired, and not exactly like the person I felt like killing.

At which point Eli comes running in and practically tackles Jake. “You’re back!” he says. He wraps his blankie around Jake’s shoulders and Jake smiles. His lip is cracked. He touches it with his finger, like he just remembered it hurts to smile.

Then my mom brings over the food and asks Jake what he wants to do today.

He shrugs. “Play some Nintendo,” he says, looking at Eli. “Maybe watch the Pirates game.” I make a big deal out of chewing my bacon and looking at my plate so I don’t have to see if maybe he looked at me when he said that.

Then breakfast is over, and Eli and Jake go up to play Nintendo while I stay in the kitchen, trying to figure out how exactly I’m going to spend the 428 minutes between now and dinner.

My mom is chewing her herbal stop-smoking gum and putting the dishes in the dishwasher.

“Aren’t you mad at him?” I just blurt it out then wait for her to get mad. At me.

She closes the dishwasher. “Of course I am.”

“Then why don’t you act like it?”

“First of all, you don’t know what I’ve said to Jake privately.”

I consider this, but decide that she could still act mad instead of acting like he’s company.

“And secondly,” she says. “Being angry isn’t going to help right now.”

Which is something I definitely don’t agree with, since being mad is about the only way I’m going to get through the next 427 minutes.

I’m sitting on the couch watching the Saturday afternoon pregame show—having killed 218 minutes reading the sports section, oiling my glove, going online, actually doing my homework, even skipping lunch just to avoid being in the same room with Jake—when I hear Mr. Furry meowing her head off at the back door.

Jake and Eli are upstairs playing Nintendo and my mom is in her room on the phone, so I get up, grab the liver treats, and open the door. Mr. Furry gives me a suspicious look. I reach down to show her I have a liver treat in my hand, but she obviously thinks I’m going to ambush her again.

At which point I decide to use the Food King technique. I make a trail of liver treats, leading from the bush to the door, not making any eye contact with her, which I figure is important for her cat dignity. I extend the trail all the way to the couch, and then go in and sit there oiling my glove, until a few minutes later, when she comes in and jumps up on the couch.

She gives me one of her aloof cat looks, which I realize is her way of saying that I’m sitting in her spot. I move over and the next thing I know, she’s nudging her head into my palm for me to pet her. Which I do.

Her fur is surprisingly warm and soft. She stretches her neck out, clearly wanting me to scratch her. Which I do. At which point she starts to purr. And so I sit there, thinking that even though she’s no Harriet the Horrible, she’s at least someone who’s small and soft and needing human attention, and who may possibly not be so lame after all.

Which means I’m sitting on the couch telling Mr. Furry to watch how Brian Giles swings, when Jake comes in. It’s more like I feel him come in, since I don’t look up. Even when he sits down at the other end of the couch. Mr. Furry looks up and stretches, but then she just circles around in my lap, pushes her head up into my hand, and sits back down. After which I sit there trying not to move or not to even breathe, like the entire future of the free world depends on Mr. Furry not waking up and going over to sit with Jake.

J
ake and I sit there watching the Pirates suck. We don’t say anything when Brian Giles grounds out to third. Or when Josh Fogg strikes out. Or when a commercial comes on where a bunch of guys drinking beer get their dog to get them a six-pack.

Then there’s a commercial for Just for Men. Jake puts his arm over the back of the couch and turns in my direction. Which makes me jump out of my seat, and means Mr. Furry practically gets dumped off the couch, which means she gives me a highly annoyed look and goes over and sits with Jake after all.

I consider going upstairs and reading
National Geographic for Kids
for the 185th time, but instead, I get up, go into the kitchen, and try to figure what to do. Which is when I see the ingredients for the orange meal sitting out on the counter, obviously for Jake’s special good-luck-at-rehab final dinner, which, at this point is only 138 minutes away.

So I grab the Cheetos and go back into the den and start openly eating them.

Finally, in the top of the fifth, Pokey Reese hits this amazing double, which turns into an amazing triple on account of the other team’s bad fielding, arid for however long it takes for the whole thing to happen, I sort of forget about how I’m not speaking to Jake. Although, technically we don’t exactly speak to each other, we just whoop the exact same whoop at the exact same time. Which totally annoys Mr. Furry, who jumps off the couch and waits for all the ruckus to end so she can go back to being petted.

After things quiet down, she blinks, looks at Jake, then at me. Then she jumps up on my lap.

I look sideways at Jake, who looks surprisingly bummed out. At which point, I decide that we can continue this stupid custody war over Mr. Furry for the next 133 minutes. Or that I can offer him some Cheetos.

Which I do, not actually saying anything, just holding the bag out in his direction. Which, if you think about it, is the kind of thing you can do without making it seem like you’re actually doing anything, at least not anything important or meaningful.

Jake doesn’t notice.

I clear my throat.

He won’t look my way.

Finally, I shake the bag to get his attention.

He looks over at me like he could care less.

Which means that I act like I could care less that he could care less. I put the bag back in my lap.

We sit there not moving until the bottom of the ninth, although I have no idea what’s actually happening in the game. All I do is count down the hits, strikes, and outs until it’s practically over, and when it is— when the sportscasters are making the kind of time-killing jokes they make when everybody knows the game is over even if it isn’t technically over—I pick up the bag of Cheetos and dump the whole thing over Jake’s head.

The next thing I know, Jake has hold of my shirt and I’m falling backward off the couch. Then we’re on the floor, kicking and grabbing at each other like crazy and taking wild swipes that don’t connect. Jake swings at my jaw. I duck and he misses. I grab for his arm and end up ripping his shirt.

Then, at some point, I’m on top. I lock my fist, cock my elbow just the way Jake taught me, and punch him, square in the stomach. He doubles up with a groan.

I sit back on my heels a second, then all of sudden, Jake rears up and throws me over on my back. He’s just about to land a punch to my jaw, when I roll away, grabbing his shirt at the same time, and throw him back on the rug. His head hits the edge of the coffee table and something falls on the floor with a bang.

Fights have a rhythm, a definite-but-not-spoken feeling that both people get that tells them when it’s over.

It was over.

We look at each other, both of us breathing hard. There’s a line of blood over Jake’s left eye and a bare, surprisingly white patch of skin that shows through where I ripped the neck of his shirt. My hand feels numb from where I banged it on the coffee table, but that’s about it.

We sit there on the rug in the middle of a bunch of pulverized Cheetos, panting, both knowing I won.

Jake goes through a bunch of bogus moves like tucking his shirt in and fixing his hair, to make it seem like it’s no big deal, which makes me feel sort of embarrassed but also sort of proud.

He dabs at the cut on his eyebrow. “Blood,” he says, actually sounding sort of satisfied.

I don’t know what to say.

“I’m gonna pay you back, you know,” Jake says.

Normally, when one person says “I’m gonna pay you back,” it means that he’s pretty much admitting that he lost but that he’s going to punch, headlock, or pinch the other one as soon as he gets the chance. Which means the other one pretty much always says “Oh, yeah?” Which means he’s also going to try to punch, head-lock, or pinch the other one before he gets the chance.

“Oh, yeah?” I say.

He reaches behind him and picks up the lampshade, which is the thing that got knocked on the floor while we were wrestling. “You know, for the Stargell.”

“Oh.”

Jake taps at the lampshade, trying to undent it. “Even though I know that’s not enough to make it up to you.”

I want to tell him I’m done collecting cards. Which is true.

But the other part, about it not being enough, is also true.

“You’ll come back?” I don’t plan on saying this. It just comes out.

“Of course,” Jake says. “Why wouldn’t I?”

I shrug. All I know is that when people in this family start coming home at 1:16, they end up coming home later and later until eventually they stop coming home at all.

“You promise?”

He nods.

“And you won’t, you know, be like that again?”

He shrugs.

He needs to promise.

Which he doesn’t do.

I look away and fold my arms across my chest.

We sit there for a long time, not saying anything. Then I look over at him. He’s pulling on a thread from where I ripped his shirt.

“I’ll try,” he says. “That’s all I can say.”