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He doesn’t lock his door. He’s never locked his door.

He’s at the sink with the tap running full cold, his right hand under it. He doesn’t turn around when the door opens.

“Hey,” he says to the window. “Hey. You won. I saw the score come up. Thirty-four? That’s a lot of shots to face on a Tuesday, Kieran.”

“Turn around.”

“I’m getting a glass of water.”

“Fin.”

He turns around, but keeps the hand in the sink for a second longer. Then he brings it out. Water runs off it onto the linoleum.

Three fingers on the right hand are black. Not bruised. Black from the second knuckle down, swollen so far past their shape that the skin has gone shiny over the top like a filled glove. The index finger points in a direction it shouldn’t.

Cold goes down the backs of my legs and stays there. I put my keys on the counter.

“I shut it in a truck door,” he says. The sentence comes fast, like he’s been holding it in his mouth since seven o’clock, waiting for me to take it off him. “Mine. The gate came down on it. The latch is shot. I’ve been meaning to fix it since October.”

He laughs, but it’s not a laugh. His hand goes back into the sink.

“You know what it’s like. You put your hand where your hand shouldn’t be.”

There’s a glass on the counter, dry. A dishtowel hangs folded over the oven handle. The counter beside the sink has been wiped clean in a wide, damp arc. There’s nothing on it: no plate, no mail, no keys, nothing.

“Get your coat,” I say.

“It’s fine. It’s going down.”

“Get your coat, Fin.”

The emergency room at Saint Brigid’s is twenty-two people deep at eleven at night. They take him back in nine minutes, which tells me more about the hand than Fin does.

I stand behind the nurse while she does the intake. She’s maybe fifty, reading glasses down her nose, clicking a pen between fields. She writes with the clipboard tipped toward her chest. I read it over her shoulder anyway.

Mechanism of injury: crush. Pt states caught in vehicle door.

She looks up at me. “Are you family?”

“Brother.”

“You can sit down.”

“I’m all right.”

She clicks the pen, writes brother present. I stay where I am.

Then there’s waiting. A lot of waiting. A television in the corner plays a home renovation show with the sound off, captions on. A woman two rows over holds a bag of frozen peas against her son’s ankle while reading him the captions in Portuguese. The vending machine at the end of the row hums, cuts out, hums again.

Fin talks to a man with a cut over his eye about the man’s transmission. He gets the whole history: year, mileage, what the shop quoted, what the shop should have quoted. He holds his injured hand against his chest at an angle, sweating through the collar of his fleece, determined to talk about a Silverado. I sit beside him with my elbows on my knees. When Fin is frightened, he talks. I let him.

The X-ray takes an hour. The doctor comes back with the image on a rolling screen. Fin’s hand is white and gray. The bones look like kindling somebody stepped on.

“Four separate fractures,” the doctor says. He points with a pen without touching the screen. “Second, third, fourth metacarpals. There’s also a spiral fracture through the proximal phalanx. This one.” He taps the air over the fourth. “This one’s the one I don’t love.”

“Because?” I say.

“Because a door doesn’t do that.” He says it flatly, like a weather report. He keeps his eyes on the screen instead of my brother, a courtesy I understand. “A door compresses. This is torsion. Somebody would have to twist it.”