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I got the coffee going, and Jayne still made French toast, but didn’t bother setting a place for Tyler, who we knew wouldn’t surface until the last possible moment. He didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but he could ride that ten-speed like nobody’s business, so the chances of him getting to work late were remote. One thing about Tyler: he didn’t seem to give a shit about a lot, but he got to work on time. He liked his money, and it about killed him to pass over twenty bucks a week to his sister in a token gesture of contributing to the household. It wasn’t me who asked for the money. It was all Jayne.
When we sat down opposite each other, Jayne picked at her toast, then finally said, “I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. I was seventeen once, and—”
“Sixteen,” she reminded me. “He’ll be seventeen in another month.”
“Okay, sixteen. Lots of kids get drunk earlier than that. Doesn’t make him an alcoholic. He’ll feel like shit today. Maybe it’ll teach him a lesson.”
“I don’t know.”
“When I was his age, I’d done far worse,” I said. “It’s a rough period, and he’s been through a lot. He’ll be a handful for a while.”
“He shouldn’t have to be your handful, Andy,” she said.
We’d been over this before. No matter how many times I told her I did not mind having her brother live with us, she could not be persuaded.
Tyler had been here nearly two months. He had been living with his dad, Bertrand Keeling, at the family home in Providence. Jayne and Tyler’s mom, Alice, had died about five years earlier. Jayne, now twenty-nine, hadn’t lived at home since Tyler was ten. He’d been one of those “surprise babies.” Jayne’s parents figured they were done with kids—Bertrand had always said Jayne was enough of a handful all on her own—but then Alice found herself pregnant when she was forty. The thirteen-year age difference might as well have been a century. Hard to be a “big sister,” and all that that entails, when you’re already in high school and your brother’s in diapers.
Bert dropped dead of a heart attack back in January, shoveling the driveway after a heavy snowfall. Bad enough for Tyler that he’d lost his dad. He was also carrying a lot of guilt. It was his job to clear the driveway, but he’d slept in and his dad had decided not to wake him. If Tyler had gotten his ass out of bed, his father might still be alive.
He went to live with his never-married aunt—his mom’s sister—in town, but she soon found that looking after a teenager was something she was not up to. That was when Jayne started wondering what she should do. She felt she’d never really been there for Tyler, and maybe now was the time.
She was going to end our living arrangement and move back to Providence. She and Tyler would live in the family home, which had not yet been sold. She drove up there to explore the idea, see if she could get the house off the market.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said to me on the phone one night. “I love you, but … he’s my brother.”
After we had finished talking, I spent an hour or two thinking about her situation, then finally picked up my phone and sent her a text:
Tyler can live with us.
The phone rang in my hand almost immediately. Jayne said, “No, I would never ask that of you.”
“It’s okay. Honestly. He can move in. There’s an extra room. We have the space.”
“It’s not my house,” Jayne protested. “I don’t have the right to ask that of you.”
“It is your house. It’s our home. And you’re not asking. I’m offering. You forget what I went through.” I reminded her how my own parents had both died within a year of each other. When my father died of lung cancer, I had just turned twelve. Ten months later, as though God himself wanted to show he had a cosmically dark sense of humor, my mother was killed when a drunk driver ran a red light in Stamford and T-boned her Toyota. With no extended family to take me in, I bounced around from foster home to foster home until the age of eighteen, when I struck out on my own.
“I know what it’s like to have nowhere to go,” I’d said. “I can only imagine how great it would have been to have extended family step up and take me in.”
So it was done. But Tyler was less thrilled about it than I thought I might have been in similar circumstances. He had to leave behind his school, his social circle. Leaving Providence and coming to Stratford meant starting all over again. And he wasn’t crazy about his sister taking on a pseudo-parental role. The kid was adrift, and Jayne and I believed we were doing the best we could to provide a stable environment for him.
Some days, we felt we were failing.
Later that morning, I was in the garage, trying to make some sense of the mess in there. The Keeling home had finally sold, and while much of the furniture had gone into storage or been donated, there were several dozen boxes in the garage of family keepsakes and mementos that Jayne wanted to go through. “Photos” and “tax records” and “Tyler stuff” were scribbled in marker on the boxes. I thought I could at least sort them into neater stacks along the garage walls so that we could get both Jayne’s small car and my aging Ford Explorer in here.
Seconds after I powered open the double-wide door, I heard the door that enters into the house squeak on its hinges. Jayne had a beer in each hand, and held out the bottle of Sam Adams in her left.
“A little early for this?” I said, taking the beer anyway.
“What the fuck,” she said, pushing out her lower lip and blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “It’s Saturday.” We clinked bottles. She was drinking something different, the label on her bottle mostly obscured by her hand.
She watched me take a swig, and frowned. “Maybe we’re not setting a good example. Drinking before noon.”
I smiled. “At least we don’t puke on the deck.”
Jayne shrugged. “Got stuff to do,” she said, and went back into the house.
