Free Sleeping Tigers by Holly Robinson Page A

man slipped a coffee cake into the oven. They must have prepared most of the food before going to the beach; it was like being in a restaurant kitchen, frenetic yet carefully orchestrated activity. These people must have been living and cooking together for a while.
    “Can I help out?” I asked.
    Cam waved a hand. “Nah. We’re better off out of the way. They know I’d just burn the house down.”
    As we continued through the kitchen’s back door and into a steamy attached greenhouse, I bristled at my brother’s refusal to take responsibility for even the most mundane aspects of his own existence. So typical!
    “Good thing you have slaves for roommates,” I said, “since you’re so helpless.”
    “Fuck you.” Cam’s voice was mild. “You don’t know jack shit about my domestic arrangements.” He settled himself in a wooden rocking chair in the greenhouse. The chair was stenciled with moons and stars. “I’ve got KP duty. Shepherd Jon doesn’t let anybody off the hook.”
    I pulled up a matching chair next to his. “And he makes the rules?”
    “It’s his house.”
    “But you pay rent, right?”
    “A token.” Cam stretched out his long legs and meditated on the steam rising from his coffee. “Without him, I’d probably be living in People’s Park. So, how are things with you? I take it you wised up and never married that petty bureaucrat with the great hair?”
    “No, I took a lesson from you and ran like hell,” I joked, then hesitated, wondering just how much to tell Cam about Peter and me, or about what I’d been through.
    I hadn’t told Cam anything at all about the breast cancer. I had started several letters, but gave up. My explanations sounded too self-pitying, even when I tried joking about the Barbie doll wigs I planned to buy if I had to go the chemo route, or how I’d be sure the plastic surgeon took inches off my hips if I needed a hunk of flesh to replace a missing breast.
    What could I possibly tell Cam that would sum up my current state of mind, when I wasn’t even sure what it was anymore? That I was scared and lonely? That I could scarcely even look at my breasts in the mirror, because the scar reminded me that someone had sliced and diced my body, taking out a melon ball or two of flesh?
    Sitting next to a brother who had become a stranger over the past two years, I realized that I couldn’t say any of these things. My guard was up against both his pity and my own. I would have to wait and work up to that conversation gradually. I babbled instead about my teaching, the break-up with Peter, and friends we both knew back home, until at last Cam put a hand on my arm and forced me to take a breath.
    “You did the right thing, leaving that guy,” he said softly. “He wasn’t worthy.”
    I sat up straighter in the chair, automatically ready to defend the man who had once been, mistakenly or not, the love of my life. “You hardly knew Peter!”
    Cam shook his head. “I didn’t have to. Remember the wet money?”
    And I did, so suddenly it was as if Cam had suddenly opened a pair of drapes across a window: I saw Peter on a blustery summer day two years ago. Cam was visiting my mother, home from a trip to India, so Peter and I had driven to my parents’ house from Boston to see him.
    Cam and I borrowed a sailboat that weekend to take Peter out on the lake. Peter had dressed the part of “an old salt,” as he put it, in a bright blue striped shirt and khaki shorts, new Topsiders and blue visor. He’d even bought new sunglasses with a braided plastic rope to hang them about his neck. But then we’d come about on the water and started scudding, and Peter had forgotten to duck beneath the mast. He was knocked clean off the boat and into the water, arms outspread and waving like a great blue heron flapping onto the water’s surface.
    Cam and I laughed, but Peter climbed back aboard with a grim, set mouth. Once we were back in my parents’ house, he immediately asked my