Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter Read Free Book Online Page A

mind.
    "Your mother ain’t going to be around now,"
he says finally, and the boy nods; he already knows that. "She
decided she don’t want to live here anymore."
    "Where is she going to live?" he says,
feeling himself beginning to cry.
    His father looks around the room, and then at the
ceiling, and finally back at him.
    "It might be better, you was to stay for a while
with your Aunt Theresa," he says again. And Peter shakes his
head; the tears drop off his cheeks onto the davenport cushion. He
feels his father watching and turns his face away.
    "I don’t know what to tell you," his
father says quietly, "things ain’t going to be the same."
And then he stands up and walks upstairs and down the hallway.
    He wipes at his eyes and looks into the park, trying
to find the little girl. He stays in that same position for half an
hour, listening to the sounds his father is making in the bedroom
upstairs. She is gone.
    He stays here until the children begin to leave the
park, holding on to their baskets and their parents’ hands; until
the mayor and Larry Tock and the man dressed as a rabbit get into the
white Cadillac and drive off to their offices in center city.
    Peter envisions these offices, quiet, dark places
full of servants and secret drawers. There are reports in the
drawers, and one of them is his.
    He saw the policeman write down his name after the
accident.
    When there is nothing left to watch outside, he backs
slowly off the davenport, climbs the stairs and walks to the end of
the hall. He does not enter the bedroom, but stands just outside. All
his mother’s dresses from the closet are lying on the bed. He
stares at the pile, recognizing the dresses, the sleeves he has
touched while her arms were inside them.
    He takes a single step, entering the room. All over
the floor are drawers that have been pulled from the dresser and
emptied into boxes. What is left of the dresser is like a skeleton.
    Her shoes are in another box, sitting on a chair near
the window, thrown carelessly inside. He thinks of tangled feet. Of
accidents.
    The bathroom door is open and his father’s shadow
lies across the bedroom floor. Peter steps farther into the room
until he can see his back. He is standing in front of the medicine
cabinet, its doors wide open, emptying the things inside into a
wastebasket that sits in the sink.
    He sees a toothbrush, a pair of tweezers, combs that
she used to hold up her hair. A razor for her legs. Perfume, mascara,
lipstick. His father picks each thing off its shelf, looks at it, and
then drops it into the wastebasket. He is in no hurry, and gradually
the sounds that her things make falling into the basket change as
they no longer hit the metal bottom, but fall onto each other.
    Glass against glass, it is almost music.
    He thinks of the music next door. He wonders if his
father noticed it, with his uncle following him across the yard,
talking. Yes, he noticed.
    There are three shelves inside the medicine cabinet,
and when they are emptied his father shuts the door. Peter and his
father find each other in the mirror.
    He comes out of the bathroom, carrying the basket.
"Things ain’t the same," he says again, sounding not so
unsure of himself now, almost angry.
    Peter sits on the bed. The movement in the room has
filled it with the smell of his mother. He holds himself still as his
father begins carrying the boxes through the open door and down the
stairs. He remembers that she had been afraid to leave this room, to
move even a finger; he remembers the feeling as he stood in her
closet and quieted himself and then stopped breathing.
    He remembers these things, trying to glimpse her, but
even with her smell in the room and her things on the bed, he can’t
find her in the way he wants. Not for even a moment.
    His father is back on the
stairs when Peter notices a small, round compact lying on top of the
things in the wastebasket. He stands up and moves to the basket, and
puts it in his front pocket. He feels it