Page 84 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Where is he?”

“County hospital up there, out past the bypass.” Fin sits down after all, suddenly, like his legs went out. “Kieran, he said one sentence to me on the way in. He said the reason he was doing it was that nobody stood in a door for him.”

The fridge hums. There’s a bag of stock in it that’s been there for a week and a half.

“You knew,” Fin says. “You knew what he was.”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

He keeps standing there.

“Since November.”

He looks at me for a long while. He doesn’t ask about the money. That’s the only question anybody in my life has ever needed to ask me, and not one of them ever has.

“Right,” he says. “Well. He’s yours, then. So go and get him.”

I put the kettle on because my hands need a job. I get two mugs down. My brother sits at my table with his bad hand flat on the wood. The fourth finger still stands off the others at the angle it’s kept since February.

“He paid your payroll,” I say. “In November. Eleven weeks of it, in cash, and he bought the padlock.”

“I know he did. I’ve known since the day it happened. I’m not stupid.”

“You never asked me for money to pay him back.”

“What was I going to say?” Fin turns the mug around. “You’d have gone through the roof. Then you’d have found the money somewhere, because you always do. I’d have been standing in a yard watching you do it again. I decided to shut up. That’s the only useful decision I’ve made all year.”

He drinks about half the mug in one go, then stands. His eyes go to the ceiling first. Always the ceiling. Thirty-one years old, and he still can’t walk into a room without pricing it.

“That window frame’s rotten,” he says at the door. “Top left. I’ll bring the stuff.”

I drive up that night.

Two hours on the county road with the radio off. I pass the turn for Fin’s and the school district job. The hospital is a low brick building past the bypass. Its parking lot is three-quarters empty at half past nine on a Friday.

On the drive up, I have a conversation with him in my head. It goes badly in nine directions, so I keep starting again. In one, I apologize. In another I don’t, and he tells me I was right. That one is worse. Most times I reach the second sentence and find nothing behind it. Everything I’ve ever said to that man has been an accounting of some kind. I don’t have the numbers anymore.

At the bypass, the rain starts and the wiper on the passenger side judders across the glass because it’s needed changing since October.

I don’t have flowers. I don’t have anything. I sit in the truck for four minutes. Then I get out, walk through the main doors, and pass a woman asleep in a chair under her coat.

The ward desk is on the second floor. There’s a nurse behind it with a lanyard and a plastic cup of soup.

“I’m looking for a patient. Brandt. Marek Brandt. He came in Thursday night.”

She types.

I stand there with my hands hanging. This is the first room I’ve walked into in my adult life with nothing to offer. No money. No answer. I’m not paying for a hip or a payroll or a mortgage or a hand. The corridor smells of hot water and floor polish. There’s nothing I can offer her or him. I’m here anyway. For five months, every useful feeling has come with a number attached. This one doesn’t. It sits under my ribs with nowhere to be entered and nobody to invoice.

“He was discharged this morning,” she says. “Against medical advice, but he signed for it.”

“This morning.”

“Yes.”

I understand what this means.