Free The Half Brother by Holly Lecraw Page B

formal; maybe not.
    THE SECOND YEAR, when the letters dropped off, I felt deep contempt for myself and my surprise. I heard she was going abroad for her junior year, to Paris, which would make no difference in my life whatsoever, other than her letters, if she ever wrote again, having foreign stamps.
    She came home for the summer, but I didn’t see her until theweek before she left, when I drove her to Abbott Pond, and she went skinny-dipping in front of me.
    A FEW WEEKS AFTER MAY went to France, Preston, who had a chronic cough that had gotten worse and who’d begun losing weight, learned he had melanoma. There were two different moles he’d been ignoring—he’d always tanned, never burned, that’s what he said, absolving himself. But the cancer had spread. There was little to be done.
    Divya told me the details. She’d heard them, in turn, from Win— Win, of all people. Preston had gone alone to his appointment, gotten his test results, gone home, sat with it for an hour, and then called Win Lowell. It was the oddest thing I’d ever heard. And yet not. Preston was in a situation; Win was a fixer. It was possible that Preston thought of him as the only worthy comrade left at Abbott, since most of the old guard—Strickler Yates, Larry Saltonstall, the legendary hockey coach, and Fred Hueffer, the previous head—had left by then. Win became the liaison, at least temporarily, the mediator between this abrupt hand of fate and the rest of Preston’s ordered world; he was the one who, like some kind of glorified servant, had called May in France, and then handed the phone to Preston.
    Family descended, briefly. I went over once, before May arrived. I was given lemonade and a cookie. Preston informed me, regal in a recliner and a red plaid bathrobe, that he couldn’t play chess that day, as though we’d had a plan, which we hadn’t. I wanted to say that he’d gotten a tough break, or something like that—something manly, but no southern manners bullshit. But in spite of myself I felt stupid and years younger, there in front of Laird and his pretty pregnant wife and Florence, who had greeted me with that enthusiasm that makes you think you’ve broken some rule; the air of emergency in the house seemed mild, almost jovial, slightly embarrassing, a brief thing that was just an obstacle to normalcy, and so I said very little.
    “Chemo once a week,” Preston said. “They’re fixing me up. We never know how long we have, anyway.” He didn’t even sound brave. He sounded amused.
    I hadn’t seen many people die.

Seven
    And then she was back.
    She hadn’t written or called. I just heard about it. I didn’t know what to do. But I knew people brought food. Whatever else people do, they bring food, so I went to the trendy little bakery in town and picked something up and drove over there.
    When she opened the door she didn’t look surprised to see me. Or she pretended she wasn’t. Instead she presented herself like she was the guest: “Well, here I am. Charlie.” She smiled a little. My name still had the whiff of a joke. Or—it had lost that scent, but now it was back?
    I followed her into the kitchen and handed her the white box. “Éclairs,” I said.
    “Éclairs? Oh,” she said. “Do you want one?”
    “Sure.” Then I looked around, foolishly, as if I expected Preston to pop out of a cabinet and join us for an éclair.
    “He’s sleeping,” she said. “I took him for chemo today.” I nodded, Oh yeah, chemo, I know all about that , but it didn’t fool her. “It’s not to cure him,” she said, in a clipped voice. “It’s just for pain.” Then she sat down, gave down, really, into a chair, there in the kitchen.
    The box sat in front of her. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. “Actually I haven’t had dinner,” she said.
    I was so stupid. I was a useless man. I said, “I should have brought that instead.”
    “I’m not really hungry anyway.” The emptiness of the house rang around