My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  “No, I really—”

  “It’s me, Melissa. I’m here in New York right by myself.”

  “Melissa?” I repeated, the voice and name suddenly familiar, though I still couldn’t place it till she said:

  “Missy. Missy Catts. Your brother Michael’s girl—”

  “Missy?” I said, sitting up. “What the hell are you doing up here alone? You can’t be, it’s not safe—”

  “Well, I’m with a group, really. We’re flying to London. And Paris, France. With Miss Pitts, d’you remember her? She’s my homeroom teacher, says she taught you English. Anyway, the stupid plane’s late, and she says I can go eat with you if you come get me. Daddy said to call you if anything went wrong, but if it’s too late—”

  “No, no,” I said, getting out of bed. “I was up. Where are you?”

  “Let me ast,” she said, then came back to the phone. “LaGuardia Airport, gate eighteen. You’ll know me, I got red hair.”

  She could have had purple hair and I would have known her, for she was Ira Sims’ female double, skinny and grinning, with a mouthful of braces and a headful of wavy red hair. Seeing her standing there in blue jeans and a big T-shirt made me feel like a very old man, but she only waved and grabbed a bag and told Miss Pitts she was leaving, then hugged me with no reserve at all.

  “You shore don’t favor Daddy,” she said with a birdlike excitement as we went in search of food. “I’m starving to death, I really am. We had this awful food on the plane, it’s the first time I ever flew anywhere. I thought I’d be scared, but—”

  “This all right?” I asked, stopping at a snack bar.

  She grinned. “Sure. Long as they have French fries. That’s all I want.”

  And that’s what she got, four bags of French fries that she consumed with true Ira Sims finesse, not missing a beat as she answered my questions and asked a few of her own.

  “How come you ain’t married? You need to come home, Welcome’s got more old maids than any church in town, nice women, got good jobs, drive nice cars.”

  She sounded so much like Mama that I laughed aloud, but she was not embarrassed at all, only giving a little sniff and saying into the air, “Well, seems like to me you’d wanna do moren read all the time. That’s what Daddy says. He says you used to read all the time, said you’se real smart. Said if we do good in school we can come up here to college, but I don’t know” She glanced around the snack area. “These people look a little weird to me, some bald-headed ones about run us over in Atlanta—”

  She didn’t seem to require much in the way of reply, so I only sat there and watched her, seeing Myra in her small hands and ocean blue eyes. But whereas Myra’s eyes were murky, distant, her daughter’s were alive, snapping with excitement as she spoke of her trip.

  “—and Tuesday we’re going to Napoleon’s tomb, right there in Paris. I love Napoleon. Mama give me this book about him and this woman who was his fiancée and I love it. I read it twict. I’m gone get my picture taken by his tomb if they’ll let me—”

  Napoleon and Josephine, I thought, and wondered if Myra remembered the Napoleon of our youths. Short and chunky and blond, who loved women with red hair.

  “—they’re all in a frazzle over Lori’s wedding; they’re getting married out by the pool the day I come back. I’m a junior bridesmaid, but the dresses are pink and I look pretty ugly in pink. I tried to get Lori to let me wear aqua, but no, she had to have pink, so I really don’t care if I get back in time or not.” She gave me a very Mama-looking smirk. “Just between you and me, they cain’t afford to wait, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t, and she tapped a French fry on the table and took a breath. “Well. Last week’s when it all come out. I was helping Clay clean the pool—he never does it right—and up come Lori, crying her eyes out. Mama took her upstairs a long time, then Curtis come up, looking like death, then Aint Candace and then Daddy come home and took us all over to Grannie’s. Had to stay there all day, not knowing what in the world was going on, then about dark, they all come over and announced Lori and Curtis were getting married next week. I mean, they weren’t supposed to get married till June, had the announcements printed and everything, and nobody had to tell me, boy. I knew what was up, but pretended like nothing was wrong.”

  A smile began playing around her mouth. “But that stupid Clay, he got mad. See, him and Daddy were supposed to go fishing at Lake Eufaula next week, and he just wouldn’t shut up about it. Kept saying how Sim got to go see the Braves and I was going to Paris, France and he never got to go nowhere, kept asking why didn’t they wait till June? Everybody got married in June—” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, Uncle Gabe, Clayton will just not shut up once he gets started on something.

  “So Daddy finally took him in the bedroom and explained it to him, but he was still mad, pouting all night, while everyone else was talking about where they’d live and what they wanted for a present. Mama wanted us to all go together to give them the down payment on a trailer or something, but Lori said they’d just like everyone to go together and send them on a nice honeymoon. I mean, that’s just Lori all over. She don’t have no sense when it comes to money, and she just kept at it all night, talking about the Bahamas or New Orleans, how she wanted to go somewhere romantic, till finally Clay—he was sitting in the corner sulking—he said, right out loud, ‘Well why don’t y’all save your money and go down to the drive-in? Looks like y’all been having pretty good luck down there already’“

  I was laughing, and she leaned over the table, beating her hand on it, saying, “He did, he really did, right out loud. Poor Mama was humiliated. She took him to the porch and whipped him, but Grannie had to go to the bathroom and put her face in a towel, she was laughing so hard. She loves Clay, he’s her favorite—”

  “Do you have any pictures?” I asked and she looked at me blankly.

  “Of who? Us?” She slapped the salt off her hands. “Oh, sure—”

  She rummaged around in her bag awhile, depositing curling irons and eyeshadow and gum wrappers on the table before finding her wallet and handing them over, each with a short commentary.

  “That’s Simon in little league. He still pitches, but his shoulder’s messed up. He’s trying to change to first base. And that’s me; I hate that picture—look at them teeth. And this is Kristin, my best friend, and Heather, my second-best friend, and Joanna, my best friend at church—” She paused over a small, wallet-sized photograph. “And this is Clayton. He don’t look like that now. He’s going through an ugly stage, Grannie calls it—”

  I held the tiny picture of a little tow-headed boy, maybe six, who favored both Michael and me with his light, cowlicked hair, but thinner, more pointed face. “—and this is Abe,” Missy was saying, still dropping pictures on the table, “my ex-boyfriend—here, I think I’ll just throw him away right now—and this is us. Lord, look at Mama’s hair, had that awful perm, looks like Bette Midler.”

  It was an Olan Mills studio portrait, Michael grayer and heavier, much like Daddy around the eyes and mouth, Myra’s wild hair full and curly, but her face relaxed, as if her life suited her, a daughter before her, a son on each side—one taller and dark, one young and oddly somber, his hand on her shoulder.

  “You can have it if you want it,” Missy was saying. “We got a ton of them. Mama got some deal, buy one, get a thousand free, or something—”

  I looked at it a long time, then carefully put it in my wallet and felt a surge of emotion building and wondered how I’d ever explain crying to this happy child, but my tears were sidetracked by a fascinating bit of news.

  Ira was in prison.

  “Over in Raiford,” she said, loading her bag back up. “Mama goes over and sees him when they let her, says it gives her the creeps because you have to drive under this sign like you’re going into a concentration camp or something—”

  “What’s he in for?” I asked and she gave me another one of those Cissie Catts knowing looks.

  �
��Well” she said, “I don’t know for sure. It’s something too bad, but Simon knows, and he says to spare myself the details. Me and Clay figure it’s got to do with women ’cause he heard Aint Candace telling Grannie that she didn’t care whose brother Uncle Ira was, he’d never step foot in her house again, not while Lori was there.” She had started on her fourth bag of fries and pointed one at me. “So see? Whatever it is, his trial took forever. Mama had to go over there and testify, but it didn’t work, and to tell you the truth, I’m kinda relieved. I mean, everybody says I look like him, but he gives me the creeps, the way he’s always smiling. I mean when Grandma died, he just smiled through the whole funeral. It was so weird.”

  I had not heard that Mrs. Odom was dead, but was more concerned with Missy “You stay away from him.”

  She grinned. “You sound just like Mama. She says he takes after their father.”

  My sentiment exactly, but I wondered how in the world Myra had brought herself to explain such a sordid evil to a child, and looked at her curiously. “How do you mean?”

  “Oh—” She finished off the last of the French fries and began folding up the bags. “—Mean, I guess. That’s what she had to go tell the jury at his trial—about their father, how he used to beatem and stuff, not when they were little, but later, after they come to Florida, he become an alcoholic.”

  Well, talk about sharper than a serpent’s tooth. “Not all alcoholics abuse their children,” I told her firmly, and she only lifted an eyebrow.

  “Really? Oh. Well maybe he just liked to.” I was about to allow as that was probably the case, but there was no time. Her flight was being called, and as we hurried back to the gate, she tried to talk me into coming home for Lori’s wedding.

  “It’ll be so fun. We’re all going out to eat afterwards at the beach, just the family. Promise you’ll come—”

  I made my excuses and hugged her at the gate while a frantic Miss Pitts waved for her to hurry, then gave her all the money in my wallet.

  “Buyem a present from me,” I told her, “in Paris.”

  “Boy,” she laughed. “Sure. I’ll say it’s from both a us. Nobody’ll believe it. Clay will die. He hates it when I know people he don’t.”

  I almost told her to buy him something, too, but hesitated, then remembered Myra and tried to think of an acceptable message, but couldn’t.

  So I only stepped back and let her go, watching her run to the plane, her bag bouncing against her back, her hair getting caught in the breeze as she cleared the outbuildings and ran out under the open sky. I kept thinking she’d turn and wave again once she made the steps, but she didn’t, her eyes already ahead, on Paris and Napoleon and supper at the beach. There was a delay, and I guess I stood there fifteen, twenty minutes before it closed up and taxied into the bright artificial lights of the runway. Even when it had gone and another plane had taken its place, I waited, feeling for my wallet and taking out the picture she’d given me, smiling at the light in Myra’s eyes. Kind, she looked, kind and accepting, a faint memory of the child on the porch steps who smiled when she lifted her face and saw me watching her.

  Hey, Gabrielle.

  Twenty-four years, it’d been, and I could hear her so plainly, not two steps behind me, and with her image a few inches from my face, I whispered into the impersonal semi-darkness of the gate, “Hey, yourself, Myra Sims. I love your daughter. She reminds me of you.”

  There was no answer, of course. There couldn’t be. A thousand miles and another life lay between us, so I kissed her lightly, then bent and laid her gently on the hard dirty pavement and walked away. I abandoned her not in cruelty, but in craft, a wily enough alcoholic by now to recognize white wine when I saw it. Clear, innocent Chablis. Low calories, light. Good source of iron, some people said. Barely alcoholic at all, eleven percent at the outside. Perfectly harmless to most people. But not to me. Not to me.

  Chapter

  13

  I made the break cleanly and was so pleased with my fortitude that I allowed myself the luxury of female companionship in the form of a colleague of mine named Adele. A native of suburban Chicago, Adele was a clinical psychologist when she wasn’t amusing a roomful of freshmen with The Interpretation of Dreams, and we saw each other pretty regularly for about a year until I realized that maybe sixty percent of our conversation dealt with mental illness and, in a rare moment of objectivity, decided I was conjuring Myra at her expense. I eventually broke it off after many hours agonized worry over how she would take it, worry that proved singularly groundless, for she was not angry at all, only nodding a lot, then getting her revenge in a very Midwestern kind of way, going on to marry another colleague of ours who was not only richer and better-looking, but who asked me to be an usher at the wedding. I tell you what, it made me long for the good old days on Magnolia Hill, where love was ruled by the Bible and the shotgun, and I was humbled enough to keep to myself till the bright September morning four months later, when, again without warning, my family reentered my life.

  The phone rang while I was standing at the counter in the kitchen brushing my teeth at the sink, watching the early edition of The Today Show, and it was such an odd hour for anyone to call that I had an immediate gut-drop premonition that it would be bad news.

  And it was.

  Michael had cancer of the pancreas, Candace told me in a clear hard voice that was so calm, so precise, that I knew she was not being cruel but was simply in shock.

  They operated on him yesterday, she said, for gallstones, but the lab results had come in at seven, and the surgeon had called the family to the hospital so he could tell them at once.

  “They give him,” she paused a moment, “give him,” then another pause, “five months.”

  For a moment, the words were unreal, hanging in the air like some half-understood joke, and when they hit, it was as if I’d been shot in the back. I slumped against the counter and lost it with such abandon that my sister was finally able to react, shouting over my tears, “He can’t! He can’t! I told Brother Sloan, no! But they told Sim and Missy anyway, they toldem he’s dying. But not Clayton, and they can’t, I toldem not to. They shouldn’t tell children things like that—it’ll scare him, he’s too little. He can’t—”

  But he did. Not in five months, but three-and-a-half, and when he called in early December and told me he wouldn’t make Christmas, I was drunk enough to tell him it was just like him to overachieve, even in death.

  He laughed, a strange, rasping laugh that didn’t sound like Michael at all, then spoke slowly. “Cabe. I need you da comb down here for da children. Remember? You probussed.”

  His voice was so strange, like he had a bad head cold; I could hardly make him out. “What? Michael? Man, I can’t understand you—”

  “Da children. Melissa and Claydon. Dere too young. Myra is drong, but da children are too liddle—”

  I had the receiver pressed to my ear, but it was like a nightmare where you need to call someone, but can’t operate a phone. “Damn, Michael, I can’t—is it Myra? Is she all right?”

  “Myra’s bine,” he insisted. “She’s drong—” He broke off a moment, and I could hear the phone falling, then being picked up again, and when he spoke this time, his voice was hoarse, but normal. “Stupid tubes,” he said weakly. “I hate ’em. Got ’em everywhere.” Then, “Myra’s fine, Gabe. She’s always with me. And Sim’s all right, but Missy and Clay are hurting. They’re too little, but what can I do? I can’t raise ‘em in six weeks.”

  It finally occurred to me that he was asking something of me, and I sat down.

  “I’m flying down Friday,” I said lightly, knowing I hadn’t answered his question, but having a hard time sorting it all out, for I was no longer used to whiskey and even a few shots got me over the edge.

  “No.” he said. “Don’t come till the funeral. I don’t want you to see me like this. I got hepatitis, and ascites. I’m skinny and yellow and sicker than hell. Everybody that comes by starts crying. I hate it.�
��

  For a moment, I was too stunned to speak, for I’d bought my tickets and made my plans and here he was, telling me not to come.

  “I won’t cry,” I said. “I swear.”

  But he only laughed, and I grew desperate. “I swear to God, Michael. I’ll be drunk, but I won’t cry.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s all behind us now, and I ain’t spending my last month on earth listening to true confessions. What’s done’s done. There ain’t no secrets between us, Gabe. I love you. And I’m counting on you to keep an eye on my children—”

  “What d’you mean, Michael? I got a job. I live a thousand miles away—”

  “Then move—”

  “But Myra, what about Myra? Does she know? You can’t just set this up—”

  “I ain’t talking about Myra,” he said. “I’m talking about my children. Missy’s been talking about you ever since she come back from France. You’re the only kin she’s got, except for Candace and Mama. And Clayton,” he paused, “he’ll love you too, when he gets to know you. And Myra,” he paused again, “what you all do is your bidness, I don’t care. She won’t talk about it. Can’t. But it don’t mean nothing to me. I don’t want her staying a widow forever. That ain’t no kinda life. But if you love her, that’s your bidness. Just,” he paused a final time, then sighed, “be kind to her, Gabe. She’s been good to me.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment, and he tried to lighten his words with a little humor. “Toldju you’d cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said flatly. “I’m dying, because listen, Michael, I’d do anything for you, anything at all, but you can’t count on me for this. I’m not the man you used to know. I’ve changed.”

  “Changed? What do you mean, changed?” Then, “Damn, Gabe, this ain’t some small favor I thought up to kill time. I need you, man. Don’t disappoint me in this thing—”

  “I’m an alcoholic,” I said, and he seemed perplexed, as if he’d never heard of the term.