The Half Brother Read Online Free PDF

dangerously close to the surface of one, as though she mightread it like Braille. “I wish I could stroke them.” She looked to either side, in high espionage mode. “Sometimes I do,” she whispered.
    If Win caught her, she would move her hand away. “I think it would be good for them,” she said defensively. “Good for them to feel our electricity, to remind them that they are made things. Like us.” Win rolled his eyes. “He is not allowed to touch them,” she said severely.
    “I don’t want to,” Win said.
    “Exactly.”
    The story of the labyrinth was that it had been put in by the house’s original wealthy owner, to cure his homesick Mississippi bride. It was boxwood, thigh high and forty feet square, and was a copy of one on the plantation where the wife had grown up. If I ever called it a maze, Win would correct me. “A maze, you get lost,” he said. “A labyrinth, you don’t.”
    He had turned himself into a garden historian to restore it and keep it up. He liked to complain and talk about the vegetables a plot that size could produce, how they could feed the town on it. But countless times I found him out back, planting replacement cuttings, or trimming away at a hedge that was already marvelously squared-off and smooth, humming to himself.
    “Do you know if it worked?” I asked once. “For the homesick wife?”
    “No idea.”
    Win’s own first wife had died when they were both young, in a car crash, and he said he’d nearly given up hope (in what, he did not specify) before he met Divya, who was now in her mid-thirties. He was a decade and a half older than she was. She had come to America to study literature, and then, when she came to teach at Abbott, “I snapped her up.”
    He wore plaid flannel shirts and ancient tweed trousers, and a graying buzz cut. He seemed like the kind of man who would know how to fix your dishwasher or your car or your furnace—the old-time, Greatest Generation kind of self-sufficiency, although in point of fact he’d served in Vietnam, something he rarely mentioned. She often wore saris, although she was not above wearing a fleece vest on top, tostay warm in their leaky house. Inside, Divya was often barefoot and Win, grudgingly, in slippers, his boots at the door, at the perpetual ready for mud season. He was, of course, from Vermont. Their sons had Divya’s wide dark eyes and Win’s square jaw. His hands were big and calloused but he touched the tops of their dark, glossy heads gently.
    That night I asked about Henry Bankhead. “Pot in his gym locker,” Win said shortly.
    “Seriously? How stupid can you be? Who found it?” I said.
    There was a pause. “I did,” Win said.
    “Oh.”
    I supposed Win had known Henry his whole life. I imagined Win confronting him. Imagined him standing there with the baggie in one of those big hands, shaking his head. “Even though it was a first strike …?”
    “It wasn’t. Thing was, he was dealing too.”
    “My theory is he wanted to be caught,” Divya said.
    “You realize that once this would have been nothing,” Win said. “Or not much. Used to be sex was the boogeyman. Drugs all over the place when I first started here. I was a dorm master for years—believe me, we looked the other way. All the time. Not now, though.”
    “Why did you say he wanted to get caught?”
    Another pause. I felt complicated currents of hesitation flowing between them. “Preston has had his troubles,” Win said.
    Divya raised an eyebrow and I knew instantly that—no surprise—she disliked Florence. She said, “It’s not always a happy house.”
    I seized on the not always . Meaning sometimes it was . It looked happy to me. The Bankhead house, the physical house, looked ideal in fact, if a slightly less quirky ideal than the Lowells’ multicolored behemoth: it was a big Victorian, a couple of shutters missing, paint on the front steps worn away, piles of sports equipment on the porch. When the garage door was open, you