“Oh, no, not that brother,” she said suddenly. “No. Theo is the one with the disability, but emotionally he’s really balanced and strong. He’s quite amazing, actually. Everybody thinks so. No, this is Stewart. He looks perfect on the outside and he’s the nicest little guy, but he just takes everything so hard, and it’s scaring me. He’s been really fragile since our grandmother died. He’s taking care of her chickens now because he couldn’t bear to have them sold off. He just couldn’t bear to part with them. Now he never talks about her, but he’s just completely obsessive about her chickens, and I think it has more to do with losing Gam, but I’m afraid to even bring it up because he just seems so fragile. But I guess I said that already. Maybe I should bring it up, but I’m not a professional. I just thought maybe this is a job for a professional. I’m not sure if you know that his parents—our parents . . . well, our father and his mother, my stepmother, died in an accident when he was just a few months old. And I’ve never really known how to deal with that original loss with him. I used to try to talk about it, and he said it didn’t matter to him, because he doesn’t remember them, and you can’t miss what you don’t remember. But I’m not sure that’s true. I think kids do miss having parents, even if they didn’t know them at all. And I think his grandmother had to fill that outsized role and now she’s gone and . . . oh, I don’t know, Fred. It’s too much for me. It’s just all too much.”
Another pause, during which Stewie noticed that his ears were burning with shame.
“No, I checked with our insurance. It’s pretty bare-bones. They just don’t cover mental, not even with a diagnosis. And I don’t think there is a diagnosis in there, Fred. I think Stewie just is who he is.”
Pause.
“Okay. Thanks. Give me a minute. Let me get a pen and I’ll write that down.”
Stewie shrank back into his bedroom and eased the door closed. He settled back in the corner with Mabel and tried to think about something else, but the words he had overheard stuck with him. They stuck into him, from the feel of it, like the scratchy tag you forgot to take off a brand-new shirt. They bothered him the way it bothered him when his sweaty collar stuck to his neck. And no matter how hard he tried to leave them behind, they clung.
And there was nothing he could do against them.
He couldn’t even fail to care.
Chapter Four
You Just Have to Know Stewie
Marilyn
The knock on the door made Marilyn jolt upright. Her heart immediately began to hammer.
She had heard that egg boy knock twice, and this wasn’t his knock. This was much harder and louder. More sure of itself.
She had been lounging on the couch, reading a magazine. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she had been looking at the magazine. Half a dozen times she’d begun an article about baby sea turtles, even though she didn’t find the subject especially interesting. But each time, her mind wandered within the first paragraph and she’d had to begin again, grudgingly acknowledging that she had absorbed nothing.
She set the magazine down and froze there a moment, hoping Sylvia would answer the door. But she heard no movement or sound.
After a time she stood, carefully and silently, and crept around the house in hopes of finding Sylvia and getting her to answer the door. Even the little girl would do at a moment such as this.
No one seemed to be home.
Marilyn ransacked her brain in search of some memory of where they had gone or why, but found nothing. Maybe she had not been told. Or maybe she had, but the information surrounding it was no longer there to be accessed.
A second hard knock jolted her out of those thoughts.
She tiptoed quietly into the front room and over to a window she knew could not be seen from the front stoop. She drew back the curtain an inch or two, hoping to see what kind of car was parked in front of the house. Would it be a police or sheriff’s patrol car? Or one of those vans from Eastbridge? Or would they send a dark, unmarked vehicle for that exact reason? So she would not know to fear it from the window?
There was no car. No vehicle in front of the house at all.
Would they have parked around back on purpose, to fool her into opening the door?
But as she watched the deserted scene in front of the house, she noticed the wagon. The little red Radio Flyer wagon, like the kind kids used to have when she was a child. They hadn’t changed much in all these years, those red wagons. Sitting inside it were half a dozen egg cartons.
She sighed in relief. And moved to the door.
She had thought he would not come again, because she hadn’t been all that friendly or nice. But she had been aware that this was the day he would come, if he was still so inclined. And she had hoped he would overlook her rudeness, because the eggs were very good, and she had finished both cartons.
She threw the door open, ready to compliment him on his new, bolder knock.
On the stoop stood a boy she’d never seen before. He was older than the egg boy, whose name she could not recall. He could have been as old as fifteen or sixteen, but it was hard to tell. He could also have been thirteen or fourteen. He was lanky and tall, even though he didn’t hold himself up very straight on his brace-type crutches. He needed a haircut. His masses of curly dark hair fell well over his eyes. But those eyes. Those dark-brown eyes of his. There was something very clear and knowing in them.
He was wearing an olive-green T-shirt, untucked, hanging down over his jeans, but with a belt on the outside of it. That seemed odd.
“Stewie specifically asked me to come to your house today,” the boy said. “To ask if you’re ready for another dozen.”
He had a way of speaking that clearly marked his disability as some type of palsy. Marilyn knew many people would find his speech hard to understand. She did not find it hard. Not at all. She’d had a roommate at Eastbridge who had been the survivor of a fairly serious stroke. Marilyn had become an expert in following words not clearly enunciated.
She missed that woman as the thought ran through her head, which struck her as strange, because she hadn’t realized she’d been particularly attached to her old roommate. She hadn’t thought of herself as being attached to much of anyone anymore.
“That was thoughtful of him,” she said, still not remembering his name, though she knew she’d just been told it. “I was hoping to get another carton.”
“You’ll have to come down the stairs to the wagon,” he said. “I’d be afraid I’d break some if I tried to bring them up.”
As she walked down the stairs with him, slowing her pace to match his, it hit her who this was.
“You’re his brother,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He told me about you.”
“Oh? What did he say?”
“Just that it would be too hard for you to do the route with the eggs. No offense intended. On his part, I’m sure, and definitely not on mine.”
“No offense taken, ma’am. It did require some figuring.”
They had both reached the wagon now, and they stood staring down at it, as though it might have something relevant to add to the conversation.
Marilyn was aware of a warm breeze on her face. It blew the leaves in the trees over her head. She could hear that pleasant rustling. The sun had dipped to a long slant behind the lake, low enough that she could glance at it briefly without hurting her eyes. It struck her that she did not go outside nearly often enough, and that she had missed it sorely.
“How are you able to pull the wagon and use your crutches all at the same time? That is, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“We figured out how to hook the handle to my belt in the back. And people can come get their own eggs, and there’s a coffee can in the corner of the wagon so they can put the money in themselves.”
“Still, it must be hard going up and down all those stairs.”
“Not at all, ma’am. I’m very good at stairs, just so long as I don’t have to carry anything at the same time.”
She lifted the lid of a carton, checking to be sure that none of its eggs were broken. It was perfect. The eggs were mostly brown with a few green, all smooth and fairly large. They looked appealing. She replaced the lid and cradled the carton in the crook of one arm.
“I’ll have to go back upstairs and get the four dollars.”
But for some reason, maybe just out of sheer instinct, she drove her free hand into her skirt pocket and felt some bills there. She scanned her mind for a memory of having put bills in her skirt pocket. Usually she didn’t carry money in her pockets, feeling it was safer in her purse. Had she done it in anticipation of a delivery of eggs?
She pulled the money out, unfolded it, and spread it out to count. It was four singles. That must have been what had happened.
“Wait, never mind. Turns out I have the egg money right here.”
She dropped it through a slot cut into the plastic lid of the coffee can. She watched the boy attach the wagon handle to the back of his belt with a makeshift hook. It seemed to have been fashioned from a wire coat hanger, like the kind they still used at the dry cleaners.
A thought struck her. As soon as it did, she realized it should have struck her much sooner.
“Is your brother sick?”
He had just begun to move away, trailing the noisy wagon behind him on the cracked and broken sidewalk. He stopped in response to the question, and glanced at her over his shoulder.