Jewel comes to his room around five o’clock. She’s got earbuds in and she doesn’t say anything. Just curls up at the foot of his bed for a while. She closes her eyes, but Jessup doesn’t think she’s sleeping. He tries reading The Merchant of Venice again but can’t concentrate.
Around six, their mom knocks on the door and calls them to dinner.
They leave the television on so they don’t have to talk. The Arizona Cardinals at the San Francisco 49ers. Jessup thinks of Coach Diggins in a 49ers uniform. The chicken tastes mealy to him, green beans stringy. He’s choking down the food, not really eating it. They are finishing up when the front door opens and Earl comes in. Snowflakes are on his coat and his hair like dandruff, already melting, the woodstove keeping the trailer warm. Earl looks tired. Jessup wants to hit him.
“Got anything left for me?” he says. Jessup’s mom, obedient, jumps to her feet and makes him a plate.
Jessup excuses himself—homework, he says—goes back to his room. Twenty minutes after that, he hears the murmur of voices outside the trailer. Looks out his window and in the shadows he can make out Earl and David John.
It’s still snowing, a light, drifting snow, steady but slight through the afternoon, an inch or two on the ground, enough to give a sense of freshness but not enough to be an inconvenience. The roads will be clear, Cortaca sending out the snowplows in full force, salt spread in even layers, blacktop gleaming through, the temperature only a couple of degrees below freezing. His stepfather and Earl are standing next to Earl’s truck, the porch light sputtering out around them, just enough for Jessup to tell the two men apart. Earl is energetic, almost bouncing, left hand in the pocket of his coat, gesturing with his right hand.
David John is still. A statue. Jessup can imagine his stepfather standing like that all night, standing like that for the rest of Jessup’s life. The snow piling on his shoulders, sloughing off his back, his arms, sun and moon rotating through, ice and rain, the trees budding and branching, the summer baking the ground, leaves drifting through the air, the snow coming again, an endless cycle of seasons and years, David John unmoving, constant. In some ways, that’s what it’s been like Jessup’s entire life, as far back as he can remember—those first five years before his mom met David John a blank spot, nothing there—David John has been steady. Even for the four years he’s been gone, he’s been a constant, Jessup’s mother cleaning houses and then working shifts at Target, Jessup cooking dinner, making sure Jewel did her homework, doing the laundry, cleaning their own house, splitting wood, whatever his mother couldn’t do, and Jewel, sitting at the table, writing him letters, asking when he’ll be home, his presence—and his absence—woven through their lives, discipline, rules, and yes, hope, hope and love and family, hard work can lift us up, believe in God, do what is asked of you and we’ll be okay, we stick together, family above all.
Except David John does not stay still.
Earl punctuates whatever he is saying by shaking his finger and, so quick that Jessup at first thinks he’s imagining it, David John lashes out.
It’s a quick hook, snakebite fast, David John’s right fist into the side of Earl’s face. Earl takes a step back and then drops to the ground, rolls onto his back, lies there, holding his face.
David John steps forward, over his brother, and from where Jessup watches in his bedroom through the window, with the way the porch light casts shadows and the snow swirls down like sorcery, David John looms despite his size, smaller than Jessup, smaller than Earl, but ground down into something elemental, fierce, and Jessup is sure that if he were on the ground, in Earl’s position, he would not dare to stand up.
And yet, after David John finishes speaking, Earl nods, and then David John reaches down, extends a hand, helps his brother to his feet. When Earl is standing, the two embrace, hold each other for several seconds, and when Earl gets into his truck, David John shuts the door for him, a sort of tenderness in saying good-bye.