Page 34 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"I don't know."

She sets down her toast and looks at me with sixty-seven years of accumulated patience. "Grant. I'm going to tell you something, and you're not going to like it."

"Okay."

"You can't decide whether to stay by researching job salaries. That's not how the decision works." She folds her hands. "Your father spent three months one summer looking at job listings in Chicago and Indianapolis. Did I tell you that?"

"You mentioned it."

"What I didn't tell you is that what stopped him wasn't the money or the logistics." She meets my eyes. "It was the morning he walked into the kitchen and you were feeding Chris before school because I was running late for work. You were thirteen. Chris was a toddler. You were annoyed about it — I could hear it in how loud you were putting down the bowl — but you did it. Without being asked. Without making a thing of it." She pauses. "He said to me that night, 'Patty, I'm not trapped. I'm exactly where I should be.' And he never looked at another job listing."

I sit with that.

"I'm not saying stay because of Sophie," Mom says. "I'm saying: If youdostay, know what you're staying for."

She finishes her breakfast. I watch her move through the kitchen and think: this woman has been surviving things her whole life while I've been somewhere else.

"Sophie texted this morning," she says. "Asked if I needed anything."

My chest does the thing. "What'd you tell her?"

"That I'm fine. That you're here." She rinses her plate. "She said she'd come by Monday."

"Good."

"Mm." Mom doesn't elaborate, which means she's elaborating in her head.

She's halfway to the sink with her mug when she adds, almost as an afterthought, the way she drops the things that actually matter into the middle of unrelated sentences: "Chris called last night, by the way. While you were out at the store."

I go cold. My body tenses and my gut twists with guilt. "What'd he want?"

"He wanted to know how the scans looked. Asked if I needed him to come out." She rinses the mug, sets it in the rack, doesn't look at me while she says the rest of it. "I told him not yet. Toldhim to wait until there's something worth driving eleven hours for."

"You didn't tell him about—" I gesture around vaguely, uselessly, at the general shape of my life right now.

"About you and Sophie? No." She finally turns around. "That's not a phone conversation, Grant. That's a look-your-brother-in-the-eye conversation, and it's not mine to have for you."

The coffee in my stomach sours, slow and unpleasant.

I've been so occupied with the logistics of staying — the salary numbers, the job listings, the house prices — that I haven't once let myself sit with the fact that somewhere in Denver, my brother still thinks of Sophie as an old chapter, and has no idea that his older brother is currently rearranging his entire life around her.

That conversation is coming. Not today, not this week necessarily, but coming, and there's nothing to do about the front except wait for it to arrive.

"He say when he might visit?"

"No timeline. You know your brother." Mom's tone stays light, but there's something careful underneath it, the same carefulness she uses when she's managing two things at once and doesn't want either of us to notice the seams. "Once things settle down, is what he said. Whatever that means to him these days."

I go back to my phone and still don't make the call.

***

Saturday, I'm in Dad's garage supposedly organizing his tools when Sophie texts.

Sophie:How's Patty doing?

First text in three days. I pick up my phone too fast.

Me:Good. Doc is pleased with her progress.