Six

I awoke in the dark and glanced at my clock. A ghostly 5:02 told me that I had slept less than four hours. I burrowed my head into my pillow, willing myself to go back to sleep. It wasn’t going to happen. The thinking had started. My debugger brain had been given a problem and had started sifting through it as if it were looking for a lost watch in a pile of leaves. Once my brain started churning like this, sleep was not an option.

Still, I tried for another hour, lying in my bed, suppressing the images and memories that boiled out of my subconscious, trying to connect to each other. I thought about Dad’s absences. His business trips. I thought about the strange chill that had wormed its way through our house. Our occasionally tense family dinners. Despite my need to sleep, I kept digging further back into my memory, looking for answers.

It was the perfume. That was the trigger. I knew that perfume; not in an erotic way, but in a comforting way. The perfume smelled like a kiss on a skinned knee, a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off, money for the ice cream truck. It smelled like love. It wasn’t my mother’s perfume.

I gave up on sleep when I saw predawn light around my window shades. I rolled out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom, then moved to the kitchenette and turned on the lights over the breakfast bar.

My little shotgun apartment was silent. It was an engineer’s dream: a line segment, with one point in my living room at the front of the house and the other point in my bedroom. The kitchenette tucked into the side halfway down, with my office across from it. If my mother had lived here, the place would have been full of crap. Perhaps because of that, my apartment was perfectly neat.

I fired up the coffee grinder and started the coffee. Then I made myself an omelet, cleaning as I went, and sat down at the kitchen counter with my roommates. Click and Clack, my hermit crabs, had also started their day. Click scuttled across the pink sand, heading for the feeding sponge, whereas Clack clung to a chunk of driftwood I had picked for him at Revere Beach. I had also gotten them an assortment of shells that hadn’t been festooned with paint and sprinkles.

I said, “Sorry to get you up so early, boys. This thing about a brother has got me all agitated.”

Clack waved a claw.

“I don’t know why it bothers me. It shouldn’t. My father was a grown man and he’s dead now, so what good can come of stirring the pot?”

Click moved a fraction of an inch on his log.

“You’re right. John Tucker should have thought of that too. Even if he was my brother. Can you imagine that? Opening the door to him and having him say, ‘Dude, I’m your brother.’ It would have been freaky.”

Clack stared at me.

“Yeah, I mean it would have been kind of cool. It would beat going to baseball games alone.”

Clack had mounted the top of the sponge and was shoveling fish flakes into his mouth.

“Sure I miss going to games with my dad,” I said. “It was the only time we talked. You’d think that if I had a brother, he would have mentioned it at a game. What’s that, Clack? He wouldn’t have mentioned it to me?”

Of course, the hermit crab was right. No generation wants to think about another generation having sex, much less talk about it. The night I lost my virginity, I got home late from a party and Dad had waited up for me so he could tell me how irresponsible I was and how much I had worried my mother. While I countered that Ma couldn’t be that worried, because she was asleep, I never told him the real news: Dad, I got laid! He wouldn’t have wanted to hear that. Instead, I told my best friend, Timmy. He slapped me on the back and gave me a high-five.

The same must have been true for Dad. He wouldn’t tell me if I had a brother, and certainly he’d never tell my mother, but he’d probably tell his best friend. It was time to visit Uncle Walt.