Free The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey Page B

lazy to fix a sandwich? Because the best you can do is press a button on the microwave?” That was it in a nutshell, though I sat there in wounded silence, heartily sick of being persecuted over trifles.
    At the time I felt more sinned against than sinning. I didn’t have a single close friend whose parents were divorced, and to some extent I blamed my father for our sad, anomalous bachelor arrangement: he shouldn’t have let his wife run wild like that, and God knows what-all he should have done about Scott. Since it was out of the question to say so (and since on some level I knew better), I avoided my father as much as possible. If he joined me in front of the TV of an evening, I’d let a decorous five minutes pass before mutely leaving the room. If he nagged me about my dirty dishes in the sink—or any number of cumulative misdemeanors—I’d slowly get up and take care of it with a look of haggard martyrdom. At least once I gave vent to my bitterness.
    “I can’t do anything right! It’s gotten to where I hate being here!”
    I meant this to sting. I wanted my father to feel contrite.
    “Then leave ,” he said. “Pack your shit and get out. Go find an apartment and live there. I’ll be happy to pay your rent.” And he went on to enumerate the many ways I’d made him feel unloved and alone these past few months, though of course he didn’t put it in those words. And while it hurts me to remember this, I was relatively unmoved at the time. Perhaps in the abstract it struck me as a shame that we, who’d been so close, didn’t get along anymore, but I thought he’d made a botch of our lives and deserved to suffer for it.
    Still, I had to go on living there—taking my own apartment would have been even more stigmatizing than the present arrangement —so later that evening I conceded I’d been less than an ideal housemate. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I love and respect you more than any person on earth.”
    Burck accepted this lame, mawkish apology with a nod and went back to his reading.
    ONE EVENING HE told me, rather irritably in passing, that my brother’s bus would arrive that night from New York; he wanted me to give Scott a ride to a friend’s apartment (Todd the Tortoise’s apartment, it turned out). I hadn’t seen Scott in sixteen months and felt no eagerness to see him now. I don’t think I registered any emotion one way or the other on learning that he was, for whatever reason, returning from New York; it’s possible I was a little annoyed at having it sprung on me like that. Anyway, I told my father I was meeting a friend that night.
    My father lowered his newspaper and looked at me bleakly. “Then you and your friend drive to the bus station at ten thirty-five and pick up your brother.” He gave the newspaper a sharp flick and resumed reading.
    Though my brother looked different, I was able to spot him from a fair distance among the shabby stragglers standing outside the station. He’d cropped his hair short for his homecoming, and his face looked older, peevish—I was fifteen minutes late—but his manner of bouncing on his toes and staring around with an arrogant upturned chin was unmistakable. He was wearing his checked trousers and a yellowing white T-shirt. I didn’t get out of the car, so there was no question of our hugging each other. The disinclination was mutual, I think, as I hadn’t answered more than two or three of his letters, long ago, and then in a perfunctory, pompous way. I was never home when he called.
    He nodded at my friend—they knew each other slightly—and tossed his duffel bag in the backseat. No more steamer trunk. He glared out the window while I tried catching his eye in the rearview mirror. I asked for an address.
    He ignored this. He wanted to know what I thought of our parents. He meant the divorce.
    “What do you mean?” I said, with pointed annoyance. I didn’t want to discuss the divorce around my friend. I hadn’t told him or anybody