Brotherly Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
closet.
    He does not belong in the closet, or even in the
room, but he cannot bring himself to leave. He stands in the dark,
the soft press of her dresses against his face and hands, and feels
her absence.
    He holds himself—and her—still, his eyes
beginning to pick up shapes of things in the back and on the floor.
He imagines his mother, afraid to move even a finger. He slows and
then stops his breathing, noticing the stillness is more perfect when
he is part of it. Moments pass, every other thing is still.
    And then enclosed in stillness, a tiny, passing
moment stalls inside him, and then takes a shape of its own,
billowing like smoke, filling him almost as soon as he first notices
it there, filling him until he is suddenly afraid there is no room
left inside himself to breathe.
    He backs out of the closet, taking as much air into
his chest as it will hold, and the moment recedes to the place it had
been before, and passes.
    He hears the pounding again, somewhere outside.
    He walks out of the room and down the stairs. The
noise stops and he stops, suddenly afraid that another moment is
caught in his chest. He waits, but it takes no shape. He opens the
front door and steps out.
    A cold mist has settled in, a kind that will last all
day. He zips his jacket to his chin and puts his hands in the pockets
and looks out across the street. The place on the curb where his
father parks—no one else has parked there for as long as he can
remember—is empty. The spot itself is dry, the outline of the car
against the wet pavement.
    Victor Kopec’s front door opens and he emerges
carrying an ax. He walks to the middle of the yard, hurrying as if he
were afraid of being caught at this. He picks up a sign lying in the
grass and begins to tap it into the ground with the flat end of the
ax.
    Peter can’t see what the sign says from the steps,
and walks toward the curb in front of his house until he can make out
the words:
    FOR SALE
BY
APPOINTMENT ONLY
CALL CATHY AT DUNNE REALTY
    Victor Kopec holds the sign with one hand and taps
with the other. He taps a dozen times, and then he steps back and
swings the ax with both hands. Not a full swing—he brings his hands
to a spot in front of his eyes, and then pulls them straight down, as
if he were ringing a bell—and an inch at a time, the stake
disappears into the ground.
    He stops and steps back, leaning on the ax, and
considers what he’s done. The sign is off center, pitched forward
and to the left. Victor Kopec drops the ax and lifts one of his black
police shoes in the air and kicks it. The noise is still in the air
when he kicks it again. The sign falls back and then forward, as if
it’s been shot.  The next kick turns it sideways, and then
Victor Kopec picks the ax up off the ground and swings it from the
side, the way Peter has seen Pancho Heurrera swing at baseballs at
Connie Mack Stadium, and hits the sign square in the face.
    Out of breath, Victor Kopec turns to see if anyone is
watching. An afterthought. And that is when he notices Peter. He
considers him a long minute. "How come you ain’t in school?"
he says finally.
    Peter does not answer.
    "You better go on inside," Victor Kopec
says, "or somebody’ll call the truant officer."
    He doesn’t move. The man is angry and afraid at the
same time. The words are not the ones he wants to say.
    "You want to make something of yourself, you got
to go to school," he says.
    Then Victor Kopec turns to his sign, which is bent
almost in half, and smashes it again. He walks back into his house
and closes the door.
    Peter wipes at the mist on his face with the sleeve
of his jacket, but the sleeve is wet too, and feels colder than the
air. He looks at the sign in the yard, wondering how long Victor
Kopec will leave it like that. He thinks of his uncle, who once shot
a cat on the steps of his house on Two Street and left it there for a
week in a plastic bag, where the old woman next door who owned the
animal would see it every time