I’ve been staying awake nights lately, wondering about that actually – why you and yours got the good deal and me and mine got such a bad one. You ever think about that?
Delia
ps. I do love her, Scarlett. Love being such a foreign concept to me, it’s pretty hard to miss it when I feel it. I feel it for her. She may be the only thing I’ve ever loved. Time will tell if I can show it better than it’s been shown to me.
I lock the trunk back up, though I don’t know why as I’m taking the contents with me – the book, letters, and photographs under my arm, the boots on my feet, the jewelry in my pocket and on my finger. When I walk into the kitchen, Jasper is sitting drinking tea. I sit across from him.
“You want some tea?” he asks, gesturing to his cup.
“I’d love some, but I have to go,” I say. “There’s some stuff I have to do. There’s this girl-”
“Delia’s daughter, Lola. She’s after you?” he asks, concerned.
“Yes, well, sort of. She killed me once already. I don’t know if she’s coming back. The book’s going to help – thank you so much for taking care of it.”
“Of course,” he says and then after a pause. “She killed you?”
“Oh yeah, she handed me my ass, and then drowned me about half a dozen times.”
“Jeezus.”
“Yeah. Totally.” I lay the silver chain with the keys on the table.
“The trunk’s yours too – you keep it,” he says.
“Will you hold onto it for me? I’ll be back for it.”
“So, you’re going to come back?”
“Of course. You’re my brother.”
“I just thought, you know, I figured you blamed me for not coming to get you when I turned eighteen.”
“You were just a kid.”
“But I should have come anyway.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“Yes you would,” he says. I pause and smile.
“Agree to disagree?” I ask gamely, holding out my hand.
“Sure,” he says, reaching out and shaking my hand, as if making a sibling pact. I push the chain with the keys towards him. He shakes his head. “Oh, you should keep the chain and keys, and there’s more, I mean, it’s not like the book, it’s not important to um, what you are or can do, but-” Jasper wrinkles up his mouth unsure and stumbling over how to define me. It’s like he’s trying to not offend me, but to simultaneously acknowledge that he gets that I have some stuff going on that the average eighteen year old doesn’t. It’s sweet. It feels like what a regular brother would do.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Well, there’s some money, not a lot, not life-changing money or anything, but it could help you, y’know, go to school, or travel, or settle down or something. I used mine for school, but there are no restrictions on it or anything. There’s also a small beach house and some land in Maine.”
“Maine?” I say, my ears perking up at the sound of the word.
“Yeah, it was passed down to mom from Grandma Jean I think…we went there a few times when you were really little, do you remember?” he asks.
“I remember,” I say. I have a home. A home that wants me.
“Well, it’s yours,” he says, smiling.
“Isn’t it ours?” I ask.
“No. They left me the house in Pennsylvania, which, I hope you don’t mind, but I sold. I just, it was too painful to be there,” he explains, eyes downcast. There’s a little pinch inside me about never getting to see the yellow kitchen I keep thinking I remember, but I had never imagined that the house was still ours anyway, and so the pinch passes quickly.
“I understand,” I say. We both must look pathetically sad sitting at Jasper’s kitchen table, heads bowed, remembering our dead parents and wishing for the years we missed with each other. Jasper speaks up, breaking the melancholy.
“So, the long silver key is the trunk, that little one is for a deposit box in Philadelphia, and the two others go to the beach house,” Jasper reaches behind him to a kitchen drawer and pulls out a thick white envelope and hands it to me. “The deed and everything you need is in there.” I peek inside the flap and then put it with the pictures and letters on top of the book. He stands up suddenly from the table and leaves the room. I sit quietly for a full minute and am about to call out to him when he comes back into the room with a small duffel bag. “Here, take this. Put the book and all that stuff in there so it doesn’t get damaged or anything,” he says responsibly, kind of like an older brother should sound. I smile up at him and take the bag, filling it with the book, letter, pictures, jewelry, deed, and my old sneakers. I put the keys in my jeans pocket.