WHEN PUP GOT HOME, his mother was waiting for him in the same place on the couch where he’d left her the day before. She had changed out of her pantsuit and washed the makeup off her face. The curls she’d set in hot rollers for Luke’s graduation were starting to wilt around her shoulders.
“You found him, Pup.” She pushed herself to her feet using her good arm. “I knew you would. I knew that only you could.”
Pup nodded. “I guess Annemarie told you where he was.”
“Yes. She told me everything.”
“Good.”
“Come here, dear. Let me look at you.”
Pup crossed the faded blue Oriental rug to meet her where she stood. She reached up and brushed her fingers along the cut on his forehead. “Are you all right? Did you put some Neosporin on it?”
“I’ll be fine, Mom.”
“Dad and I are headed over to the hospital to meet the rest of your sisters.” She picked away a piece of his hair that had stuck to his face with dried blood. “Do you want to come?”
“No, Mom.” He shook his head. “I’m really tired. I think I might just go upstairs and lie down.”
“Okay.” Her eyes grew momentarily brighter, the only outward sign that he’d hurt her feelings. “Can I bring you anything?”
“No, thanks. I just want to sleep.”
He climbed the stairs slowly, like an old man. He was too tired to even remember to give the seventh-stair angel the finger.
When he got to his room, he yanked the shades down and slept sweatily through the afternoon. He was awoken at one point by the sound of the key twisting in the front door lock, followed by the murmuring of conversation. He could make out the voices of his parents, at least two of his sisters, and some nieces and nephews—Adrienne and Charlie and maybe Tara, and the joyful babbling of eleven-month-old Chloe. Pup usually loved seeing his nieces and nephews, but right now the thought of dealing with all of them overwhelmed him. He rolled over, pulled a pillow over his head, and went back to sleep.
Later still, the voices had dwindled to just two—his mom and his dad—and he smelled hot dogs cooking on the grill in the yard, and also possibly the little yellow onions that his dad grew in the garden and liked to cook in aluminum foil drizzled with olive oil. His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten anything since the breakfast Sal had made for him hours ago. But even the promise of hot dogs with grilled onions and, most likely, homemade potato salad, could not flush Pup out of his room. Every time he thought of Luke in that place, the smell that had come off him as they had grappled over his keys, the yellow film over his unbrushed teeth, the cracked lips, the suffering in his eyes, Pup felt sick. He just didn’t know how he would handle it if his family started asking him a million questions, or worse, if they didn’t ask him anything at all.
It was only after he heard the slow creak of his mother’s footsteps up the stairs; after he felt her silently listening outside his door, knuckles poised but unable to bring herself to actually knock; after the slow retreat of her steps back down the stairs again; only after he heard the click of the television and the muted excitement of the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow, after the house grew quiet and enough time had passed that he knew his parents would both be asleep on the couch, that he tiptoed downstairs. With a pang of sadness, the first thing he saw on the kitchen counter was the plastic-wrapped plate containing two hot dogs with grilled onions and potato salad that his mother had made up for him. In the stillness of the house that always seemed to be speaking to him in a volume just below what he was capable of hearing, Pup stood on the moonlit kitchen tiles and ate his dinner cold. When he was finished, he brushed the crumbs into the sink, washed his plate, and, closing the screen door very softly behind him, went outside to shoot free throws.
He’d just finished his warm-up and was getting ready to start his drills at the post when he saw the figure shambling down the alley, hands deep in pockets, shrouded in a hoodie despite the warm night.
“Hey.” His face was freshly shaven, and without the black beard it looked pale and tender, like if you poked it with your finger it might leave a lasting indentation. “Annemarie told me I’d probably find you out here.”
“Well.” Pup dribbled the ball once, twice, visualized the rim. “Here I am.”
“I have a court date in a couple weeks. Annemarie’s going to try to get my charge downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor. We’ll see. Either way, it’s not good.”
“You looking for an apology or something?” Pup released the ball into the air. It banked off the backboard and Luke caught it.
“I’m not looking for an apology.”
“Well, then why are you here?”
“To talk to you about something.”
“About what? Give me the ball.”
“No.” Luke leaned against the garage and slid down to sitting, holding the ball in his lap. “Just sit with me for a second.”
“Why? Why should I listen to anything you have to say?”
“You shouldn’t. But I need you to listen anyway.” Luke swallowed, and the tender, scraped skin of his neck moved up and down. “Please.”
Pup sighed. He sat down next to his brother.
“I have to tell you something that I never told anyone before.”
“I already know. Carrie told me. You’ve only been pretending to go to law school.”
“Yes. I have. But it’s not that.”
“Oh.”
“It’s about Patrick.”
Pup flicked his eyes in Luke’s direction, but his brother was staring at the asphalt.
“I was the last person to ever talk to him.”
Pup blinked. “When? The day he—the last day?”
“Yes. He called me that morning. He said he felt like crap. Headache, body ache, stiff neck, puking. I said, ‘Well, were you out last night?’ And he said yeah, he’d been at a party for his fraternity. And I said . . .” Luke paused to swallow again, as if there was too much saliva welling in his throat. “I said, ‘Well, idiot, you’re hungover. Go get some Taco Bell and call me later.’ And he said, ‘No, Luke, like I feel really crappy.’ And I said, ‘How much did you drink?’ He said one beer. He asked, ‘Could I be hungover from one beer?’ And I started laughing. I said—” Luke leaned his head down and pressed it against the cool nubs of the basketball. He closed his eyes and breathed into the rubber. “I said, ‘Well, Pat, what can I say? You’re a fuckin’ lightweight.’” He looked up at Pup, his blue eyes hollowed out by the darker blue bags that hung beneath them. “I told him to go to the gas station, buy a Vitaminwater, take a couple aspirin, and go take a nap. So that’s what he did. He took my advice. And then—a few hours after I hung up with him—that’s when Rinard called Mom, saying they couldn’t wake him up. But by that time it was already too late. And if I had just listened—if I hadn’t been such a dick, if I hadn’t brushed him off—he’d still be—he’d still be—” Luke couldn’t go on. His pressed his face into the curve of the basketball.
Pup sat frozen beside him. He remembered when Jack Rinard had called the house. He’d been sitting at the kitchen table doing his Spanish homework, conjugating verbs. His mother had answered the phone, listened for a moment, then buckled against the counter, dropping the kitchen sponge she’d been holding. He could still remember the wet sound it made when it hit the floor. Sitting there with his pencil hovering over his Spanish workbook, Pup could feel a dark charge in the air, even though she didn’t say anything, even though he couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end of the line. Then she ordered Jack to call an ambulance, to let her know as soon as it arrived. “Don’t leave him,” she said. “Not even for one second. Don’t let them tell you that you can’t ride in the ambulance.” Her voice was calm, capable, full of authority, but as soon as she hung up, she turned to Pup and her face melted into a puddle of terror.
“Pat’s sick,” she said. Then, she said it again. “Pat’s sick.” Before he had a chance to ask what she meant by that vague word, sick, which could describe anything from a case of the sniffles to stage-four cancer, she had grabbed her car keys off the counter and was running wildly through the house looking for Pup’s dad, who was out in the garden, weeding as usual. When she finally found him, Pup witnessed but could not hear their conversation through the window, his mother waving her hands frantically, his father nearly keeling over in the grass, and then they were running through the yard to the garage, his mom without a jacket despite the October chill, his dad still wearing his gardening kneepads. Pup looked down at his workbook. He was still holding his pencil. Looking back on it now, he realized that he knew, even then, how it would end. The words on the page blurred in front of him. Perder was the word he was trying to conjugate. Pierdo. Pierdes. Perdemos. I lose. You lose. We lose.
“So now you know,” Luke murmured into the basketball, “that I’m the reason why he’s dead. If I’d told him to go to the infirmary. Or urgent care. . . . If I’d gone downstairs and asked Mom what she thought. . . . If I’d acted even a little bit less like the hotshot asshole older brother I’ve always been, he’d still be alive. He’d be twenty-three years old. He’d be out here with us right now, shooting free throws with his terrible Joakim Noah form, and we’d be making fun of him for it, and somehow he’d still be beating us. But instead he’s dead, because I killed him.”
“Luke,” Pup whispered. “You didn’t kill Patrick. He just died. It was an infection. It—it happens to people, sometimes. Even young people. They get sick and they die.”
“It does not just happen. Do you know one other person who died when they were twenty years old? Do you?”
“Izzy’s brother,” said Pup. “Teddy. He didn’t even make it to twenty. He was only eight.”
“That’s different. That poor kid had some horrible kind of incurable cancer. What Patrick had wasn’t like that. They could have cured him, if they’d had enough time. And maybe they would have, if it wasn’t for me.” He was trembling all over, despite his hoodie and the eighty-degree night. “He should have called you that morning instead of me. If he had called you, he’d still be here. What you did last night—tracking me down, calling the cops on me—you think I hate you? You saved my life, Pup. You saved me. Because that’s what brothers do. That’s what strangers do. But not me.” He shook his head slowly. “Not me. My brother was calling me for help. My brother was dying. And what did I do? I told him to sack up and take an aspirin.” He was crying so hard now that snot leaked from his nose and he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “And I love you, Pup. I love you so much. I love you so much and I’m so sorry because now you hate me, but I’m glad you hate me, because I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve anything. Not family, not success, definitely not love. I gave up my right to all those things the minute I hung up on Pat that day and let him die.”
“No,” Pup said softly. “No. No. No. No.” This was the one argument he would not let Luke win. As he repeated that one word again and again, until it became a chant, a hushing soothing sound, a lullaby, he was remembering Patrick’s advice when he’d been training to make the freshman team at Lincoln. You don’t have to be the best, Patrick had said, flipping him the ball as they ran through their hundredth shell drill of the morning. You just have to be the most tenacious. You just have to outlast them. “No,” Pup said again. He would outlast Luke’s words with his chant, his refusal, his no. And it worked. At last, Luke gave up. He collapsed against Pup’s shoulder, his ragged breathing evening, and the basketball fell from his hands and rolled away down the alley.