Part 13
Part 13 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
The second Thursday in November nothing happened at all, and it is the best afternoon I have had in my adult life.
I got there at two with the cookies and a rotisserie chicken, because I had discovered that if I brought food he would eat it and if I asked whether he needed food he would say no.
He had the radio on. Not music. A call in show about the Bengals, two men in Cincinnati arguing about a left tackle with the specific fury of people who have nothing personally at stake.
“He’s not the problem,” Danny said, to the radio, not to me.
“Who isn’t?”
“This guy they’re mad at.” He got plates down. Two plates. “They’re mad at him because they can say his name. It’s easier than being mad at a system.”
I sat down at the card table.
“Do you follow it?” I said. “Football?”
“I follow the arguing.”
We ate the chicken off paper towels because he only owns two plates and he wanted to save them for something, which he did not explain. The radiator banged twice. Somebody below us was running a washing machine that walked across the floor on the spin cycle, and he said, without any particular feeling, “Tuesdays and Thursdays, that’s Rosa, her grandson’s got a lot of uniforms.”
Afterward he got the cards out.
“You remember how?”
“Danny, I have not played euchre since 2009.”
“So that’s a no.”
“That’s a no.”
He dealt anyway, five each, three and two, the way our father dealt, slapping the kitty down in the middle with two fingers because that is also the way our father did it, and I watched my brother’s hands doing our father’s hands and I had to look at the calendar on the wall for a second.
He beat me four hands straight. He was not gracious about it.
“You’re leading trump,” he said. “Why are you leading trump.”
“Because I have trump.”
“That’s not, Claire, that’s not the reason to do it.” He was actually annoyed. It was wonderful. “You have to think about what I have.”
“How am I supposed to know what you have?”
“Because I told you.” He tapped the table twice. “I told you when I passed.”
I lost the fifth hand too, and the sixth, and somewhere in there the light went orange on the wall behind him, the way it does in November at four o’clock, and he made tea without asking, and we played cards.
That’s it. That is the whole thing. Nobody said anything true, nobody cried, nothing was resolved, and I have thought about that afternoon every single day since.
At five thirty I started gathering up my coat, and he squared the deck and put the rubber band around it, and he said it the way you’d ask about the weather.
“When’s she coming?”
I stood there with one arm in a sleeve.
The tests, I had told him. They were running tests. It had been eleven Thursdays since I said that and he had not asked once, and I had let myself believe that meant he had stopped wondering, and of course what it actually meant was that he had been not asking on purpose, the way he did everything, carefully, for weeks.
“Soon,” I said.
“Okay,” said my brother.
And he walked me to the door and stood back from it while I went out, so nobody in the hall would see him, the way he had done every single week since September.