Out of Nowhere(6)

A knock on the door startles me. It’s got to be Brian. He’s the only one who stops by unannounced.

Still, I yell, “Who is it?” at the door as the deranged killer mows down an attractive young couple with a thresher.

“Uh, me.”

I’m lucky Brian didn’t just use his key. Thank god I pretty much broke him of that habit last month when he walked in on me jerking off.

A chorus of screams and revving motors is the soundtrack to my brother grinning in the doorway, holding up a six-pack of Yuengling bombers. A few years ago we saved a bunch of those twenty-four ounce cans to be the base of a beer-can Christmas tree, moving to twelve-ouncers toward the top. It was pretty epic.

“Game’s on,” Brian says, tromping in and plopping down on my couch. He cracks open a Yuengling and tosses one to me. It’s warm. “Dude, what the fuck is this gonna be?” he asks, waving around one wing of the DeLorean’s chassis.

“Dude,” I mock, “aren’t you supposed to be a fucking mechanic? What does it look like?”

Brian, impervious and immediately bored as ever, drops it on the coffee table and changes the channel to the Penn State–Michigan game. We watch in silence for a while as Michigan pulls ahead by a touchdown. After a commercial, during which Brian explains how he could tell that the woman who brought her Accord in for an oil change wanted to sleep with him, the broadcast shows an aerial shot of Michigan stadium, teeming with maize and blue, that pulls out to include the fall leaves and artificially green grass of what must be a golf course nearby.

“Hey, Col? Do you think Daniel’s okay?”

Daniel. Our youngest brother moved to Michigan last month for an English professor job. He didn’t even tell us he was leaving until the night before he split. Which was par for the course, considering he didn’t really give a shit about any of us anyway.

“Okay, how?”

“Well, just. Michigan. Like, what do they even do there? Is it near Ann Arbor, where he is?”

“Nah, it’s north.”

“So he’s not teaching, like, at Michigan.” Brian points to the TV, and I shake my head. Brian’s never looked at a map in his life. Hell, I don’t think he’s ever been anywhere outside the Philly area except a few trips to the Jersey shore and one ill-conceived trip to New York to see a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden. He ended up getting trashed and puking into my empty popcorn bucket—well, mostly empty.

“You heard from him?” I ask, trying to sound casual. I’m definitely last on Daniel’s to-call list.

“Nope.” Brian fiddles with the remote. “Do you think—I mean, did you know he was going to move?”

“He certainly didn’t fucking discuss it with me, no.”

No, Daniel hasn’t discussed anything with me since he was about twelve—hell, he’s barely spoken to me since the day he told me he was gay. It’s like there are two different Daniels. There’s gay Daniel who couldn’t be bothered to hang around with us, who thought he was too good to let anyone know he was related to mechanics, who thought we were stupid because we didn’t walk around with our noses shoved in books the way he did. Then there’s normal Daniel, which is how I remember him from when he was a kid. Normal Daniel used to follow me around and dress like me. Hang out with us, watching Pop fix cars and running around the garage playing our brutal version of Marco Polo that usually ended in one of us walking, eyes closed, into some sharp car part or piece of machinery and Pop cursing us out as he poured alcohol on our cuts and slapped Band-Aids over them.

“It’s just weird,” Brian’s saying. “Like, I know he was busy with school and stuff, but I never thought he’d just… not be here anymore.” Brian starts biting at his cuticles, which is truly disgusting because he always has grease on his hands. “I guess he wouldn’t’ve been happy working with us anyway, though, huh? But remember how good he used to be with the cars?”

I remember. He was a natural, quickly sorting out what information was relevant to diagnosing a problem and what was secondary or unrelated.

“Remember the time that old buddy of Pop’s brought his truck in and was trying to explain some complicated problem about a fuel line? Daniel wandered in from school and looked at it and was like, ‘Hey, Mr. McShea, you got a loose gas cap, huh?’”

I snort. Daniel had been about ten, a skinny pale kid with jet-black hair that was always in his face. He wore our old hand-me-down clothes, so they hung on him, making him look even smaller. Mr. McShea had turned bright red and Pop had pulled Daniel close to his side and rubbed his head. Daniel kept a straight face until Mr. McShea turned around. Then he grinned up at Pop and over at me and ran inside to do his homework.