“Oh,” Charles said in return, freezing in place.
They blinked nervously at each other. Charles couldn’t remember the last time they were in the same room together. His brother still had his down parka on. His black ski cap was lying on the kitchen table. He had just arrived here, from wherever he’d been. Something about him looked smaller today. Meeker. And tired, too, all his energy wrung out.
Scott’s throat bobbed. He turned back to the fridge, to whatever was wrapped in the foil. “I was looking for turkey,” he explained. “But instead, there’s this … I don’t know what the hell it is. Paté, maybe.” He sniffed it and made a repulsed face. “I think this has been in here since Great-grandpa lived here. Maybe Great-grandpa put it here.”
“Great-grandpa,” Charles repeated, somewhat idiotically. The word felt foolish in his mouth. They’d never called Charlie Bates Great-grandpa, had they? He’d died before they were born; he was too unknown to them to have a nickname. At the same time, Charles knew him so well. Charlie Bates loomed over this house, his picture in almost all of the rooms. He was part of every conversation they had. Who they were supposed to be. Who they weren’t. The differences between them.
Suddenly Charles was unclear about the history he shared with his brother. It all felt jumbled in his head, some of it fact, some of it twisted, opportunistic fiction. He felt so unsure about everyone in his life, too, so heavy with what he now knew about Bronwyn. He needed to get out of this room.
“Anyway,” Charles said, letting out a held breath and ducking into the garage.
The room was dark and smelled like oil. He flicked the light on next to the door. There was his father’s BMW, silent and shiny. Behind it were cans of paint, shelves of tools, a band saw, some shovels. He spied something folded up in the corner. Charles walked over to it and pulled it out from the cobwebs. It really was the same tent from all those years ago; he remembered the yellow posts.
He bent down and looked at the other shelves. The aluminum staking poles were also there, all tied together with a big purple rubber band meant for vegetables. The carabiners, which locked the posts together, were on the floor underneath the shelf. His father, anal to the end, had even saved the instruction booklet; it was nestled in a ziplock nearby.
Charles gathered everything up and started to carry it to the backyard. It took a few trips. Once there, he laid it all out on a flat piece of grass: the posts, the carabiners, the tent with its exoskeleton, and the vinyl subfloor. He spread the tent out, assembled the poles, and started to stake them, just as the instructions said. When he had all four poles staked, he raised them up so the tent stood and pulled the carabiners around the poles to secure them. Sometimes the instructions didn’t make sense, and he had to study the figures for a long time before he understood how to attach all the carabiners and posts together in such a way that the tent would stand on its own, tight and secure. It took him a long time, probably far longer than it had taken his father, but doing it alone, doing it with no one watching, he felt able to make mistakes.
He heard a door slam and jumped. Scott was standing on the back porch, chewing on what looked like a hunk of bread pulled raggedly from a loaf. He carried a backpack over one shoulder. “You mind moving some of the poles?” he said. “They’re blocking my car.”
“Oh.” Charles dropped the tarp and walked toward the driveway.
Scott looked at the tent somewhat blandly, as if he wasn’t surprised that Charles was building it. “Do you want any help?”
“That’s okay,” Charles said, dragging the poles to the grass. And then he waited for Scott to make fun of what he was doing. Scott just kept chewing. He didn’t move.
“Yeah, I guess you got it almost up,” his brother remarked after a while. “Better than Dad, anyway. He couldn’t build for shit.”
One of the rods slipped from Charles’s hands. “What do you mean?”
Scott stuffed another piece of bread in his mouth. “Dad was pathetic. Acted like he knew what the hell he was doing. He would never admit when something didn’t make sense. He was hopeless, though.”
“Dad could build things,” Charles said weakly. Couldn’t he?