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Show street where she will sort through dozens of boards to find the kind my father likes, the ones without knots and bows, straight and truel In my memory, she has not been with us all day even though I know we only had weekends to work on the patio and deck, so we used every minute of the thin spring daylight. It is understood that we will work all day. All except Bryan. He is not yet a year old, can't walk, still crawls from room to room in search of someone to play with. Home from the hospital for more than half a this world. The first day I saw him, he had been gone so long I had forgotten he even existed. In fact, when my mother met me at the school bus and asked me to guess who was inside the house, I answered, Diane. The smile on my mother's face dimmed for a moment, disappointed, I suppose, that Bryan wasn't a stronger presence in my life the way he was in hers, but then she led me to the bassinet holding my baby brother, his blond curls forever tightened by the heated incubator. When I saw him lying there wrapped in blankets to help increase the circulation in his new skin, he looked like a birthday present. That was months ago. In fact, it feels as though Bryan has always been with us, except for now, as I stand underneath what will become the deck, helping my father work on one of the pillars. Given a reprieve, for the moment, Scott plays with the pliers in the shade of the cinderblock wall. My father's head is bent in concentration as he pounds yet another nail into the wood. I hold the boards straight. Having heard the voices below and tired of playing with the same old toys, Bryan crawls to the edge of the doorway on the second floor of the house, the door that used to lead to a set of stairs but now leads to 66 |