: Chapter 26

My whole life I’ve looked up to Conrad. He’s always been smarter, faster—just better. The thing is, I never really begrudged him that. He was just Conrad. He couldn’t help being good at things. He couldn’t help that he never lost in Uno or races or grades. Maybe part of me needed that, someone to look up to. My big brother, the guy who couldn’t lose.

But there was this time, when I was thirteen. We were wrestling around in the living room, had been for half an hour. My dad was always trying to get us to wrestle. He’d been on the wrestling team in college, and he liked teaching us new techniques. We were wrestling, and my mom was in the kitchen, cooking bacon-wrapped scallops because we were having people over that night and they were my dad’s favorite.

“Lock him in, Con,” my dad was saying.

We were really getting into it. We’d already knocked over one of my mom’s silver candlesticks. Conrad was breathing hard; he’d expected to beat me easily. But I was getting good; I wasn’t giving up. He had my head locked under his arm and then I locked his knee and we were both on the ground. I could feel something shift; I almost had him. I was going to win. My dad was gonna be so proud.

When I had him pinned, my dad said, “Connie, I told you to keep your knees bent.”

I looked up at my dad, and I saw the look on his face. He had that look he got sometimes when Conrad wasn’t doing something right, all tight around the eyes and irritated. He never looked at me like that.

He didn’t say, “Good job, Jere.” He just started criticizing Conrad, telling him all the things he could’ve done better. And Conrad took it. He was nodding, his face red, sweat pouring down his forehead. Then he nodded at me and said, in a way that I knew he really meant it, “Good job, Jere.”

That’s when my dad chimed in and said, “Yeah, good job, Jere.”

All of a sudden, I wanted to cry. I didn’t want to beat Conrad ever again. It wasn’t worth it.

After all that stuff back at the house, I got in my car and I just started driving. I didn’t know where I was going and part of me didn’t even want to go back. Part of me wanted to leave Conrad to deal with this shitstorm by himself, the way he’d wanted it in the first place. Let Belly deal with him. Let them have at it. I drove for half an hour.

But even as I was doing it, I knew that, eventually, I would turn back around. I couldn’t just leave. That was Con’s style, not mine. And it was low, what I said about him not being there for our mom. It wasn’t like he knew she was gonna die. He was at college. It wasn’t his fault. But he wasn’t the one who was there when everything got bad again. It all happened so fast. He couldn’t have known. If he had known, he would have stayed home. I know he would have.

Our dad was never gonna win a Father of the Year award. He was flawed, that was for sure. But when it counted, there at the end, he came home. He said all the right things. He made our mom happy. Conrad just couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to.

I didn’t go back to the house right away.

First I stopped at the pizza place. It was dinnertime, and there wasn’t any food at the house. A kid I knew, Mikey, was working the register. I ordered a large pizza with everything, and then I asked him if Ron was out on a delivery. Mikey said yeah, that Ron would be back soon, that I should wait.

Ron lived in Cousins year-round. He went to community college during the day and he delivered pizzas at night. He was an okay guy. He’d been buying underage kids beer for as long as I could remember. If you gave him a twenty, he’d hook you up.

All I knew was, if this was gonna be our last night, we couldn’t go out like this.

When I got back to the house, Conrad was sitting on the front porch. I knew he was waiting for me; I knew he felt bad for what he’d said. I honked the horn, stuck my head out the window, and yelled, “Come help me with this stuff.”

He came down to the car, checked out the cases of beer and the bag of liquor, and said, “Ron?”

“Yup.” I hoisted up two cases of beer and handed them over. “We’re having a party.”