It made sense that Toby would play the hero. Not only was he two and half years older than me, he also embodied the term. He was just plain good at everything. Give him a baseball bat, or a math equation, or a guitar and he would figure out how to make them work. People called him “Brilliant,” “Amazing,” and “Genius.” His best friend, Duke Manheim, used to call Toby, “Flat out impossible,” with a tone that revealed the awestruck depths of his admiration. The last few times I visited Toby, he could no longer hold a cigarette between his fingers; they trembled too badly. Instead, he pinched the filter between his teeth and sucked them down in a few desperate puffs.
Daddy answers the phone and at first he smiles. “Hey there, Rick,” he says, and I know it’s Mr. Manheim, Duke’s father and one of Daddy’s best friends. The call does not interest me as much as my brother’s condition, so I return my attention to Toby, who finishes wiping the dirt from himself and insists Mama leave him be as he steps into the house. Instead of remaining in the kitchen, Toby creeps out of the room without a word. No, “Hey, kid,” or “Hey, squirt,” for me.
I look to Mama for an explanation, but the concern and confusion on her face matches the gray swirl of chaos in my head. She wipes her hands on her apron and turns to Daddy. I follow her gaze and am surprised to see the expression on my father’s suddenly red face. I can’t tell if he’s about to scream or vomit. He notices us gawking at him and pulls the phone away from his ear.
“Betty, take Peter on out of here.” His voice is so quiet and dry it whispers like a desert breeze. Mama opens her mouth with a question, but the words die on her tongue. “Just go on now,” he says. “Be sure to get that chicken off the burner. We don’t want it scorched.”
The phone rang again. I switched the device to vibrate and then stood and passed through the kitchen on the way to my workbench in the garage. Its gouged wooden top was bare — no toys or toasters or bikes needed my attention. The rows of tools on the pegboard were little more than decorative these days. I hadn’t had a new project on my bench since my daughter, Jocelyn, had gone off to college.
Above the bench was a small board with a number of keys, each one hung on a hook beneath a neatly printed label. I lifted the set that opened the doors to my parents’ house — Toby’s house now — and slid them in my pocket. Then I leaned on the bench and tried to remember the last thing I’d fixed there. The lamp from Jocelyn’s room? My old ten-speed? I couldn’t be certain.
I’d picked up the tinkering bug from my father, and though a good deal of his talent had been lost in the genetic translation that was me, I managed to fix most of the household items that landed on my bench. My father, however, had been truly gifted in this regard. He could repair just about anything, spot the failure in a second flat, and once he identified the problem, he set to fixing it. His days were spent selling heavy equipment at the John Deere facility in Barnard, but on the nights he wasn’t bowling at the Longhorn Lanes or swapping stories at the VFW hall, he mended, repaired, and even invented. He was the master of broken things. Everything could be fixed, could be improved.
Mama escorts me to the door of the bedroom I share with my older brother and tells me to wait inside while she goes to talk with my father. Toby lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
He doesn’t look at me when I enter.
“You were in a fight?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. Instead he crosses his arms over his eyes, and I wonder if he’s crying. On the shelves above his bed sit his shining trophies — for bowling and basketball, for baseball and football. Thirteen of them. I know because I’ve counted them a hundred times. My shelves hold books and a single award: a tiny third place trophy for peewee football that has sat without a companion for five years.
“Who’d ya’ fight with?”
“Duke.” Toby croaks the word but there are no signs my brother is crying, and that reassures me.
“Duke is your best pal,” I say, confused.
“No he’s not.” Toby rolls onto his side, facing away from me.
I know the wounds on his jaw and eye are pressed into the pillow and they must ache, but he doesn’t roll back toward me. He doesn’t move. I continue to ask questions, but he won’t reply, and I persist and I pester, because nothing makes sense to me. Folks admire Toby, they celebrate him, and the only people who weren’t his friends were the ones too intimidated to get close, so why had Duke Manheim thrown fists at my brother? At the boy he himself had proclaimed, “Flat out impossible”?
The door opens and Daddy steps inside. He crosses his arms, gazing at me without so much as a glance for my brother.
“You go on down and eat your supper,” he says. “I need a word with Toby.”
“What did Mr. Manheim say?” I ask.
“Never you mind about that.”
And I know it’s bad. I can tell by the frown on my father’s face. Whatever Duke’s father told him was hateful and wrong, but it was more than that. “He lied,” I say, though I have no idea what was actually said. My only instinct is to defend my brother from the motherless cur’s accusations. “You know he did. Toby didn’t do nothing wrong. Duke’s a liar and Mr. Manheim’s a liar and that’s all there is to it.”
“Go eat your supper, Peter,” is my father’s quiet response.
I stretched out on the sofa and listened to my brother’s messages. Each word stung like needles passing through my chest, and after listening to the last message—“The machine still works, Petey. It still works.” —it felt as if a surgeon were yanking the sutures tight, pulling my ribs together so that my heart had no room to beat.
How could my father have built that thing? He wasn’t a bad man, ask anyone. Nearly a hundred people had attended his funeral, and all of them spoke of his kindness, his humor, his helpfulness. He was a Christian, but quietly so, never waving his Bible, never wielding scripture like a weapon. As a father, he was evenhanded and warm. He believed in the belt; he used it infrequently but with great seriousness.
Lying on the sofa, looking at the ceiling and through it, imagining my wife in bed, turned to the wall the way Toby had been turned away, I remembered the sound of my father’s belt cracking across my brother’s backside as tears fell from my cheeks — more salt for the fried chicken on my plate. My mother said nothing. She ate nothing, merely pushed a fork through her potatoes, creating trenches as if preparing soil for planting.
“Your brother is going to be staying in the workshop for a time,” my father says.
I don’t understand. “What did he do?”
“He’ll be staying in the workshop for a time,” my father says as if I hadn’t heard him. “Go fetch my army cot from the attic and take it down to the kitchen. Then your mother will take you into town for a cone and a coke.”
I grew restless on the sofa. The past and present fell on me like blankets of fiberglass, scratchy and insulating, keeping things in that I’d rather expel. I stood. In the kitchen I took a beer from the fridge. With my tongue and throat soothed, I sat on a barstool at the kitchen island and traced the lines of grout that formed gutters in the tiled countertop. My finger pushed against a pile of mail, scooting the low stack toward the counter’s edge.