“You’re asking if I remember?” she had said. “I’m the one who paid for all those guitar lessons. I always knew he had talent.”
Alice smiled, because this, too, was true.
Now, Alice let go of Caitlin and breathed deeply, steadying herself. She had one more person to whom she wanted to give the same gift Rob had given her—the gift of the truth, the gift of knowing that the tingling in your veins, your senses, were real, that they reflected some echoing in the universe that all was not quite right.
“I haven’t been honest with you either,” Alice began. “That’s why I brought you here. I want to tell you something.”
“What?” Caitlin wiped her face again. She sniffled, recovering.
“You know how I don’t really like to talk about my brother.”
“Yeah. We don’t know like anything about him. Besides he was named Robert.”
“Robinson.”
She pointed, and Caitlin’s eyes followed her finger. “See that window? That was his. Since I went to the house, I’ve been thinking a lot about him. Way before he died, when he was younger than you, he ran away, and Mimi and I didn’t know where he was.”
“What happened to him?”
“I didn’t know. But I decided that I would go try to talk to some of his friends and find out. That’s why I was in New Orleans. Not for work.”
Caitlin sat back into her seat.
“I guess he thought we were better off without him. He loved music, and he played guitar in some bands, and then he went to prison for dealing drugs. He got sick. And he died. You may not remember. You were young when we went to his funeral, but I was pregnant with your brother.”
“I remember.”
“But I missed him so much. Even when I tried to forget him, even when I didn’t want to remember him, I missed him. And it was wrong not to talk about him. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to remember him.”
“What was he like?”
Alice looked back at the window, struggling for the words to describe Rob. She said the first thing that popped into her mind. “Messy. He was messy and loud and big-hearted. He wore his heart on his sleeve and didn’t follow other people’s rules, even when he probably should have.” The useless images popped into her mind. How much he loved cherries, him reading the encyclopedias like a novel, him yelling in the clearing.
“He made me a better person, I think. I know he did. He was a good person, he was a good brother and son, even with his faults. We loved him anyway.
“And smart. He was so smart. When we were kids, he had the best memory. He could memorize entire plays and recite them. And passionate. He fought for what he wanted and never gave up. You remind me of him sometimes. You fill up a room, like he did, the air changes a bit when you’re there.”
“I wish I could have met him.”
“Me too, sweetheart. Me too. But I have something for you, something he wanted you to have.”
Alice opened her door and went around to the trunk. There, she popped open the new guitar case, still without a scratch from the shop, and pulled out Rob’s guitar, polished and beautiful, like it was when he left with it on Amelia Island. She brought it back to the car and handed it to Caitlin.
“For me?”
Alice nodded. She smiled, seeing her daughter with it, holding it awkwardly, like Rob had in the childhood portrait her mother used on his funeral pamphlet.
Caitlin strummed the perfectly tuned strings.
“Thanks. I love it.”
“See here?” Alice pointed to the back of the guitar, and Caitlin turned it over. Rob’s initials—RWT—still stood out against the wood on the back of the neck. She’d had the shop add another line—CLW.
Caitlin ran her fingers over the inscription, smiling. She turned it in front of her and ran her fingers along the strings. “What should I play?”
“Think about it, but I’d suggest Nirvana.” Alice opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”
“Mom, where are you going?”
“Stay there!” she called.
She walked purposefully past the workers still standing about, ducked under the construction tape, and opened the door to her parents’ house.
Inside, the place had been completely transformed. The beautiful wooden floors her mother had cherished had been stripped away to reveal the baseboard underneath. The jewel-toned wallpaper took on a dark and eerie quality from the light that peeked out of the remaining windows. The furniture was gone.
Sure, sell everything, Alice had told the estate company. It was better for the environment, more cost-effective, and she had loved the idea of the wooden plank that she ran on with Rob being used in another kids’ house. She didn’t know it would look like this though.
She stomped up the stairs, straining to see in the light. The doors were gone too. “This antique woodwork is in demand nowadays,” the woman had said. She walked into Rob’s open doorway, through his empty room to the closet. The little hideaway door where she had crawled as a child was still intact.
She opened it and crouched down inside, just far enough to slip in a single piece of paper, ripped, then taped down the middle. On one side, a strong-eyed little girl looked at her older brother. The boy, loopy around the edges, looked back at her with love. The back had neat cursive on one side, so small you’d need to lean in to read it. The other side sported Alice’s all-caps print, large on the page, the short letter going end to end. DEAR ROB, it began. She left them there, the brother and sister, the pair, looking at each other, happy and strong, in the home they kept for each other, and skipped back down the steps, shutting the makeshift front door behind her.
“Now can we start?” the man sitting in the backhoe’s compartment said, and another one made a motion with his hand. Alice jogged, head down, to her car and climbed back inside.
“They were really mad you went inside.”
Alice only shrugged, like Rob would have done.
A beeping started, and they looked back at the equipment trampling her mother’s flower beds. The backhoe inched up slowly, high above the house. It blocked the sun from Alice’s car.
Then, so slowly that it didn’t seem like there would be enough force to destroy the house, the claw crashed through the roof and down to Rob’s window, splintering the wood and sending bricks flying.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Dear Rob,
I delivered your letters because I wanted to find out who you really were.
What I realized, though, is that I already knew. I always did.
You taught me so much. What love was. How to start over. That if you keep a box of secrets in your mind, it will only grow to define you. That you can’t untangle yourself from those who stamped their dreams, their ambitions, their personalities, and their love on you.
Even though years have passed since we’ve talked, there are so many things that only you can understand. So much I need to tell you.
So, I know you’re right, that we’ll see each other again one day. I look forward to it, how you’ll come up to me in the tree house like the kids in your story. You’ll look at me and say, “Where were we?” And we’ll pick up right where we left off.
Love,
Al
Reading Group Guide
1. Describe Alice and Rob’s relationship as children. Were they different from typical siblings? In what way?
2. Put yourself in Alice’s shoes. If you found a box of unopened letters from a lost loved one, would you deliver them without reading the contents? Would you open the letters first?
3. Rob spent a lot of his adult life secretly looking after Alice, but he never made direct contact with her. Do you think he should have? Why do you think he chose not to reach out, even when they lived in the same city?
4. Rob writes letters to the most important people in his life, eithe
r praising or censuring them. If you conducted a similar project, who would you write to and why?
5. Describe Alice’s relationship with Maura, her mother. Now compare Alice’s relationship with her own children, Caitlin and Robbie. What do these relationship dynamics look like? What are the similarities and differences?
6. After college, Alice finds herself at a crossroads: she must choose between an adventurous life or a safe one. She ultimately picks a predictable route and marries Walker. Why do you think she does this? What would you do?
7. Compare Walker and Jake. They are very different, but in which ways are they similar?
8. Do you think that Jake should have told Alice when he found Rob, or was it better to keep his promise of secrecy?
9. There are quite a few tragic moments in this book. Which one hit you the hardest? Why?
10. Walker isn’t a good husband, but he is crushed when he learns that Alice never loved him. Did you feel sympathetic for him during that scene, or did you feel he deserved it? Why do you think he was so blindsided by what happened?
11. After his initial disappearance, Alice’s father never tries to find Rob. Why do you think that is?
12. Jake tells Alice that he’s willing to wait for her. Do you think that they will ever get back together? Why or why not?
A Conversation with the Author
What inspired you to write How to Bury Your Brother?
In 2014, just a month after graduating from the University of Georgia, I had a dream. I saw a woman visiting her parents’ house after they passed away, desperate to learn more about her estranged brother. The dream stayed with me, and as I left Georgia’s creeks and rivers behind for a move to Washington, DC, I kept returning to this woman, her own past in those rivers and the questions she had about her brother. What did this woman—Alice, who became my main character—want to know? Why was her brother estranged from the family?
A few years earlier, my family had lost a member to opioid addiction and overdose. When someone dies under such circumstances, there are so many questions, chief among them: Why? It’s the question that propels Alice throughout the novel, and the one with which I immediately identified. As so many families impacted by the opioid epidemic know, there’s no easy answer to that question.
The Southern landscape, particularly the outdoors, feels very important in this novel. Why did you choose it as a setting?
I grew up in Georgia, with a childhood that looked very similar to Alice’s—though thankfully, with far less family drama! Like Alice, I spent many days playing outside with my younger brother, at the creek in our backyard and the woods around our house, which we nicknamed Stick and Snake City.
Setting the story in Georgia, where I grew up and had rarely left previously, was a comfort to me throughout the writing process. As I walked along DC’s tourist-clogged streets, listening to the blaring motorcades and marveling at the grand monuments of America’s forefathers, I knew Georgia waited for me on my computer. When I felt most homesick, I dove into the forests and rivers of my youth, jumping into the canoe right alongside Alice and Rob.
I also had my best friend, Breanna Crowell, for inspiration. I borrowed her career for Alice in the book. Like Meredith and Alice, we were college roommates, and her missives on water conservation, tales from measuring water foam along Georgia’s beaches, and complaints about counting leaf hairs on sunflowers, as Alice does in the book, all served as inspiration to me as I typed the story at the Dupont Circle Starbucks, wishing I was soaking in the sun and salt from Georgia’s shores along with her.
What was your creative process for this book like?
I didn’t plot the book. I had the dream, with Alice in her parents’ house, the funeral scene that kicks off the first chapter, and the final letter to Alice, including the revelation inside. That was it though. I tried not to think too deeply about writing A BOOK when I first started. Instead, I thought I would write until I didn’t feel like it anymore. But the story kept coming. And coming.
During my years working on the book, the story changed drastically. During the first draft, I added and deleted characters as I was writing, changed previous plot points, added or deleted characteristics of the Tate family, all with the goal of writing to the end without editing. When I finished the book and dove into revisions, they were extensive. I would describe it as a painful process! Although I write articles often for journalism, I wasn’t used to editing one piece of writing for so long. At times, I had significant parts of the manuscript memorized from reading it so many times.
For my second book, I’m hoping to make things a bit easier on myself by doing more plotting before diving in. Still, though, I find my best ideas come from “flying by the seat of my pants.”
Each letter gives Alice (and the reader) a glimpse into a different chapter of Rob’s life. Was there a certain letter you enjoyed writing about the most?
Since I didn’t plot the book, each letter was just as much a surprise to me as it was to Alice. Although we don’t see the exact content of Rob’s letter to Dylan, that scene was my favorite to write. It’s the discovery in that meeting with Dylan, that Rob was in Athens, that really tips Alice’s world and shows her that her relationship with her brother wasn’t what the perhaps more pessimistic side of her thought. Writing that scene and the secret included in it also showed me that I wanted to keep going, to keep following Alice and see what she would find about Rob.
This book takes a very realistic stance on grief—you don’t avoid confronting the damage inflicted by abuse and loss. Was it a challenge to get yourself in the right headspace to write the more heartrending parts of the story?
Honestly, no. I tend to feel things very deeply and be empathetic, which is probably true of most writers. I summoned my own experiences with grief throughout my writing of the book and could put myself in Alice’s headspace pretty easily. While editing the scene where Alice gets her final letter, I almost always started tearing up right along with her. The challenge bigger than getting in the headspace was getting out of it. I would try to skip around in the manuscript so I wasn’t concentrating for long periods of time on the book’s saddest sections, and several times, my husband (thankfully) encouraged me to step away from the computer and back into the real world for a few hours.
A lot of these characters must live with the consequences of their elders’ choices. What drew you to the idea of generational trauma?
In Southern families in particular, I believe the stories you inherit mean more than many other things you may inherit from your family tree. My own family trafficked in stories, and they were the most valuable currency around the dinner table or at family celebrations. After the food had been eaten and the dishes done, everyone would gather over the evening’s empty wine bottles to tell stories. Many, the kids heard so many times we could recite them ourselves (those were the favorites), but as we aged, the stories went back further and spanned out more completely, even the tragic ones told in the uniquely Southern tongue-in-cheek way that sneaks laughter into the painful parts.
Real or fake, the stories Alice has heard throughout her life, the stories the family members have told themselves and one another, have devastating consequences. More so than the trauma, it’s those that travel with Alice into the future, even without the storytellers there to tell them.
What are you working on next?
I’m working on my next novel, which is slated to come out in summer 2021.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Katie Shea Boutiller, for believing in this book, championing it, and for offering wisdom, kindness, and speedy answers to my anxiety-induced emails.
Thanks to everyone at Sourcebooks who supported me and supported this book, especially my editor, Shana Drehs, who made this book better with each reading. Thanks to Diane Dannenfeldt and Heather Hall for correcting my commas and taking out the AP style I can’t seem
to shake.
Thanks to my DC writing group friends: Everdeen Mason, Dana Liebelson, Britt Peterson, Julie Zauzmer, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Dana Stuster. Plus, special thanks to our fearless leader, Cat Traywick, and to Stephen Mays for many conversations while walking along the Potomac. Without your deadlines, encouragement, and notes, this book would be an incomplete Word document.
Thanks to the many people who provided feedback on this book during my writing process, especially my mother-in-law, Dr. Sandy Sipe; my grandmother-in-law, Eva Sue Smith; and my dear friends Whitney Wyszynski and Allison Prang. Thanks also to Jaci Shiendling, Brant Moll, Autumn Lindsey, and Maggie Giles. Apologies to anyone I may have missed.
Thanks to Professor John Greenman of the University of Georgia, for believing in big dreams.
Thanks to Patti Callahan Henry for your advice and generosity and for showing me that writing and publishing a book is possible.
Thanks to Breanna Crowell for letting me steal your career, for telling me that honeysuckles were invasive in the South, and for your limitless friendship.
Thanks to Julia Carpenter for your warmth, encouragement, endless readings, and constant conversations about Rob and Alice over glasses of red wine on Seventeenth Street. Those nights will forever seep into my memories of writing this book.
To my family for your support and for raising me to love a good story. To my grandmother, Gertie, to whom this book is dedicated, for withstanding the many hours of my moaning by the computer while you pushed me to perfect my school papers, for your crusade to “culture” me, and for many readings and thoughtful comments on this manuscript. Thanks to my brother, Davis, for the inspiration of many days in Stick and Snake City. To my parents, Jennifer and Jeff, for allowing my childhood bedroom to become cluttered with hundreds of books and for teaching me the importance of empathy. Thanks to my mother, especially, for being nothing like Maura. Your constant support makes me feel like anything is possible.
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