My Brother's Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

facedown when she cleans. I keep putting it back up.
    I turn the picture faceup, then I shuffle through the mail, even though I can tell from the feel of it that there’s no letter from him. Nothing personal, just a catalog, which is technically for my mom but which Jake steals so he can look at the pages with women in their underwear, and an American Express bill. I lift the rubber band from around the bundle and pry the credit card bill free, secret-agent style. Then I stand there wondering exactly what it is I was planning to do with it. Eat it?
    I slip the envelope into my back pocket and go upstairs, where I lock the bathroom door and count my gray hairs. I quit after I get to thirty-two. Then I sit on the fluffy green thing that covers the toilet seat and wonder if pulling out the eleven hairs I found a couple weeks ago caused twice as many more to grow back like my mom said it would. Then I get up and try 185 different ways of combing my hair so I won’t look like a thirteen-year-old senior citizen, until I finally give up and put my baseball cap on.
    Which reminds me that I need to get my mom to sign a permission slip for tryouts stating that if I get brain damage on account of getting hit in the head with a line drive, or getting struck by lightning in the outfield and I’m paralyzed for life and have to wear diapers and eat through a straw, that she won’t sue the school. Although it doesn’t technically mention lightning and diapers, it does say that parents agree to buy their kids cleats and to pay for the uniforms to be dry-cleaned at the end of the year.
    I decide that’s not something you can ask a mother to think about when she’s blowing her nose on a paper towel because she can’t pay the bills and when she has one son who’s out with a known drug dealer and another son who doesn’t have the guts to come in and make her a baloney-and-mustard sandwich, and when she herself may be suffering from a rare terminal disease.
    So I sign it myself and go up to my room and stare at the Stargell.
    W hich I’ve done about 185 thousand times since I got it. Which is probably roughly equal to once every seventeen seconds. Which you would think would get boring but it gets more amazing the more I do it. Even if during the other seventeen seconds when I’m not looking at it, I’m thinking about looking at it. And even if when I’m not looking at it or planning on looking at it, I’m thinking about how much my dad’s gonna love looking at it.
    A t 1:16 in the morning, I’m still staring at the Stargell. Technically, I’m arranging Bill Matlock and Tim Foli and Phil Garner and the rest of the ‘79 World Series team on the same page in my binder and trying to stay awake, when the front door creaks opens.
    Which probably in a normal house is just a normal sound, but which in our house is like a car alarm going whoop, whoop, whoop right inside the front door.
    I jump out of bed and run downstairs.
    Jake’s standing there watching the coat rack, which he just banged into, wobble back and forth. His eyes are squinty and his mouth is hanging open. “Check it out, man,” he says.
    “Shut up,” I say. “You’ll wake Mom.”
    He gives me the look. It’s the same look my dad used to give me at 1:16 or 2:55 or 3:39 in the morning.
    The look that, in my dad’s case, meant he was going to get all emotional and recite the list of people he loved—like the guys at the mill or his old high school baseball coach or Lucky, the famous dog from his childhood who was supposedly so smart she did everything on his paper route except collect the money.
    Or he’d give me the look that meant that he was going to get all bummed out and recite the other list, the people who he said “just didn’t get it"—like the Republicans or the management at the mill or the guy at the unemployment office who gave him the same load of crap he gave him the week before. Then he’d just shake his head like he was the one who just