Part 7
Part 7 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
Thursday I took a personal day and told Tom it was for the estate lawyer.
That was the first one. I want to mark it, because I told myself at the time it was barely a lie, and because of where the lying went later.
I got to Brandt at one thirty and sat in the car for twenty five minutes. At two o’clock I went up.
The stairwell was the same. Game show on two.
I put the key in the lock and I did not turn it. I knocked twice, the way you do when you are trying to sound like a person who is allowed to be there.
And then I said, “It’s Claire.”
I heard him come. Four steps, a pause, the chain.
The door opened about eight inches and stopped, and a hand came around the edge of it and took hold of the door frame at the height of my shoulder.
The last two fingers didn’t close.
They lay along the wood, straight, not gripping, the way they had lain along the handlebars of a bike and the neck of a guitar he never got good at and the steering wheel of our father’s truck. Nineteen eighty something Ford, a door slammed on a hand by an eight year old girl who was mad about something she cannot now remember, two fingers that healed wrong because we were the kind of family that decided a thing was fine.
I had done that. I had done that when I was eight and he was six and he never once, not one time in the years I had him, used it against me.
I made a sound. I don’t know what it was.
The door opened the rest of the way.
He was thirty one years old. He had our mother’s coloring and our father’s build gone thin, and gray coming in at the sides already, and a beard that had been cut by somebody who loved him and had no idea what they were doing. There was a burn scar on his forearm I did not know about. He was wearing a Bengals shirt from a season he could not have watched.
He looked at me the way you look at weather.
“You got taller,” my brother said.