Free She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel Page A

morning, pull the wagon down to the elevator, and pick up scraps of coal to help us heat the house. Our father didn’t help him, didn’t stop him, didn’t acknowledge it, and Dan performed this task without a word.
    Later he did many things to save my father from shame, and even though those things might have made Dan feel ashamed himself, they too were done in silence. He was just a boy. My sister used to hide under her pillow and weep about the wagon and the disgrace; she couldn’t bear it. Those are her memories but she has lent them to me.
    They were one family and I was another, so late, an Afterthought. They had one set of parents and I had another; they had a decade already shot past and I missed it. But I loved him, loved him, a little girl is helpless against her love for a brother. I climbed on him, harassed him, begged him to carry me, take me with him wherever he was going. From a distance he seemed both cold and receding, a man whose most familiar feature was his back as he walked away as fast as he could. But there are pictures of him, many of them, holding me as a baby, standing with me as a little girl, and the eye of the camera sees what nearly everyone but Elaine missed: a tenderness so wounded it had grown ferocious and fixed as the evening star. Really, I barely knew him. When our family’s darkest days arrived he could not be reached, he demanded to be left alone, he wanted no part of it, and for years I believed he hated us. I thought he had simply wandered into the wrong family in the first place, like a toddler at a strange picnic who grew into the handsomest of princes but remained bound by name and history to the peasants who had lured him with potato salad and a tricycle.
    In truth, if there could be said to be one truth about my brother, it is that he carried both a tombstone and scraps of coal in a little red wagon, and what that did to him and what it meant to him is written in a closed book in a library guarded by dragons. He sang like an angel, he was faithful to God and he waited honorably for the wife he believed God chose for him. He made two daughters who shone like mirrors in the direct sun; he blazed his path with a scythe and his broad shoulders, and he was who he
chose
to be, which is the hardest and bravest thing a man can do. He looked at us, his parents, his sisters, his whole crooked family, and he flexed his jaw muscles, packed up his truck, and drove away.

Church Camp
    When Melinda found out she was pregnant she told me in the library of my elementary school, where she’d come to pick me up after school. I still remember what she was wearing: it was early March and she had on a pair of pale blue and black plaid pants with a pale blue mock turtleneck. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was wearing gray eye shadow. Lindy was friends with our school librarian, Mrs. M., who was married to the very handsome, tyrannical band director, Mr. M. Melinda had even bought a puppy from them, a parti-colored cocker spaniel named Callie. Calliopia. She was one of those precious cockers with eyes like a Walt Disney dog, not the other kind that bite children in the face for kicks.
    Lindy told me, and she told Mrs. M. at the same time. Mrs. M. was a tall, gorgeous, elegant blond woman with perfectly straight hair and a perfectly straight nose and teeth; she had come from another planet, obviously, and had an aunt she called DaDa. Mrs. M. exclaimed, “That’s so wonderful! Congratulations!” and touched Melinda’s belly in a proprietary way. She asked the stream of questions that was bound to follow, “When are you due, do you want a boy or a girl, what did Rick do when you told him?” I just stood there in Juvenile Fiction, trying to get out of reading another book by local author Dorothy Hamilton. She was wonderful and I was very very happy we had an author in Indiana (they weren’t thick on the ground in the Hoosier State), and I’d already read about a hundred of her novels. What I