Chapter 7 - The Severing of the Golden Child
The air outside the Mechanicsville house smelled of pine mulch and cold mud.
I had the signed confession in my leather briefcase, the latches clicked shut, and was halfway down the three brick steps when the storm door banged open behind me.
“Mara! Wait up. Just… wait a second.”
It was Caleb. He hadn't put on a coat; he was in his boots and his grey flannel shirt, the cold January wind flattening the fabric against his ribs. His face still had that grey, hollowed-out look of a man who had watched his personal reality slip three inches to the left.
I didn't stop walking until I reached the driver’s side of my Subaru. I turned around, my keys held between two fingers, the metal cold against my knuckles.
“What do you want, Caleb?”
He stopped five feet away, his hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind. For the first time since he was fourteen years old, he looked shorter than me.
“Look,” he said, looking down at the gravel between our boots. “I didn't know. About the letterhead. The email stuff. Mom told me… she said you were just being difficult because you were working sixty hours a week and didn't want to deal with the logistics. She said she was helping you out by taking the admin work off your plate.”
“You believed that?” I asked.
He shifted his weight from one boot to the other. “Why wouldn't I? You always handle it, Mara. Ever since Dad died, you just… you write the checks and we show up. That’s how it works.”
“That’s how it worked,” I corrected. “Past tense.”
Caleb swallowed. He looked back toward the house, where the curtain in the front living room twitched once and then fell still.
“Mara, I’m in a bad spot,” he said, his voice dropping into a hurried, confidential whisper that made my stomach turn. “My draw at the brokerage… I’m forty-five hundred dollars behind on my quarterly production quota. If I don't hit my numbers by the end of this month, they’re cutting my base salary to twenty-eight thousand. That’s why I was so pissed about the motel rooms on Christmas. I put the Days Inn on my personal card, and I’m already at eighty percent utilization on my credit limit.”
I stood there, watching him.
The sky above Mechanicsville was the color of a wet slate shingle. A crow sat on the top of Thomas’s old aluminum ladder under the carport, preening its wing with a dry, clicking sound.
“Mom told me before Thanksgiving,” Caleb continued, taking a step closer, his eyes suddenly bright with that frantic, greasy optimism he used when he was trying to sell an umbrella policy to an elderly neighbor. “She told me not to worry about the bonus. She said you were having your best year ever at the firm—that you’d landed that state library contract—and that you’d already told her you were going to cover my truck payment for four months as an early Christmas gift.”
A short, dry laugh came out of my throat before I could stop it.
“She told you I was going to pay your truck payment?”
“Yeah!” Caleb said, leaning in, thinking he had found a seam in the rock. “She said you knew I was struggling with the new territory and that we were all going to pull together like Dad would have wanted. That’s why I bought Nora that camera lens for her birthday—I thought I had the cushion! Mara, if I could just get a loan… three thousand. Just until my February renewals come in. I’ll sign a promissory note. Julian can draft it at your office. Ten percent interest, I swear to God.”
I looked at my brother.
I looked at the clean, square line of his beard, which he had trimmed at a boutique barbership in Short Pump that charged forty-five dollars a visit. I looked at his boots, which were three-hundred-dollar Red Wings he had bought because he liked the way they looked in his Instagram stories when he visited suburban construction sites.
He was thirty-two years old.
He had never once asked me what my mortgage payment was. He had never once asked if my partner Julian was healthy, if our firm was carrying debt, or how much I had paid for my father’s headstone when the shipyard insurance policy fell three thousand dollars short of the cemetery’s minimum fee.
He didn't see a sister.
He saw an ATM that had temporarily developed an error code.
“Caleb,” I said, my voice dead and quiet.
“Yeah?”
“Sell the truck.”
The silence that followed was so complete that I could hear the tire hum of a delivery van three streets over on the boulevard.
His face twitched. “What?”
“Sell the truck,” I repeated. “You drive forty miles a week between your apartment and an office park in Glen Allen. You don't need an F-150 with a six-inch lift kit and chrome rims. Sell it, buy a twelve-year-old Civic with a dent in the fender, and pay your own damn rent.”
“Mara, I’m your brother!” he hissed, the panic finally turning back into that ugly, entitled anger that was his only real defense mechanism. “You have forty thousand dollars sitting in your business reserve! Mom told me she saw the statement on your desk when she visited your office!”
“My mother,” I said, unlocking the Subaru with the key fob, “is a convicted forger who is one phone call away from a felony indictment. And if you ever set foot on the second floor of my office building again, Caleb, I will have the property security escort you off the premises in handcuffs.”
I opened the car door, slid behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut.
Caleb stood in the wet gravel, his hands balled into fists at his sides, his mouth working silently as I turned the ignition. The Subaru’s boxer engine purred to life with a clean, mechanical hum.
May you like
I didn't look at him again. I backed out of the driveway, my tires throwing up two small arcs of grey mud, and turned the car toward the city.
***
