“S’okay,” I tell him.
“I brought you here under false pretenses.”
I reach my hand up to his face. “That was a rotten thing to do,” I say. “But I’m glad to have you as my brother. To know you.”
“I just wanted to meet you so bad,” he says. “And I tried a bunch of normal stuff and then it turned out the one stupid-idiot-awfulthing I tried was the thing that worked. And I kept telling myself that things generally turn out fine. Like if I just didn’t tell you any stuff that might upset you, somehow it would still end up okay.”
“You were in a very weird situation.”
“I was,” says Meer. “We all were.”
“I love you.”
“I loveyou,Pookie.”
“Pookie?Since when am IPookie?”
“Since now.”
“Okay, fine, if it has to happen.”
“Yah, it does,” says Meer. “You know I like cute names for things.”
I pat his hair. “I think after breakfast burritos we’ll feel a little tiny bit better. Like a microscopic bit. But it’ll be something. Okay?”
“Okay, Pookie,” says my brother. “We have a plan.”
—
We’re at theNorth Road Café. I know I have to do something with the letter Kingsley wrote to Meer. The whole car ride, it’s like a grenade in my backpack.
I excuse myself to the bathroom and take it out.
I love you but you do not deserve it,Kingsley wrote.
I couldn’t see it before. I was so caught up in my own ideas about our father, my own need to be validated by him. I saw only Kingsley’s feeling of betrayal, his imprisonment.
But Holland had a point. The drawing of little Meer is beautiful, but Kingsley’s words are hateful.
Meer should never read them.
A Kingsley Cello sketch is worth something like six thousanddollars, and maybe Meer would want to see it no matter how cruel the words are.
But Kingsley is dead.
And Meer feels terrible already.
This is my chance to disrupt the cycle of parental rejection, the tiny bit that I can. Our father’s hateful words won’t hurt my brother.
In that dank restroom covered with graffiti and with an empty plastic bottle of cheap hand soap balanced precariously on the small, stained sink, I rip the paper into a thousand pieces and flush it down the toilet.
66
We order burritosand super-large coffee drinks. We wait for the food in bone-tired silence, staring at a bulletin board that lists island events and babysitting services, yoga offerings and pony rides. When our order comes up, we carry everything to a picnic table on the lawn.
The day is bright. Tourists and summer people clutter the café porch and parking lot.
It feels like we live in a different world than they do. Like we’re moving more slowly, weighed down by sadness, conscious that this strange summer is coming to an end for all of us.
