“You two know you’re not supposed to be—” Saul stops as he sees the mess Lionel has made. “What happened?”
He moves across the room so quickly he’s almost a blur. I watch him pick up what’s left of the lamp and turn it over in his hands, inspecting every nook and cranny. He shakes his head as he looks at Lionel.
“Why would you do this?”
Lionel doesn’t say anything, and the longer he stares at the floor, the madder Saul looks.
“Lionel, you knew this was for your grandmother’s birthday. I can’t believe you would ruin all my hard work like this.” Saul’s tone is steady, but that almost makes me feel guiltier than if he were raising his voice.
Lionel is almost always cranky, and he doesn’t want Mom and me around. I don’t think it would take all the fingers on one of my hands to count how many times I’ve seen him smile. But we have to live together, and I’ve never had anything like a brother. I think it will be easier if we’re friends.
He still doesn’t say anything, and then all of a sudden I start talking.
“He didn’t. I dropped it, Saul. I’m sorry.”
From across the garage, my mother says, “Suzette!”
Saul’s face is confused. “You did this?”
“I wanted to hold it. It’s really pretty.” I swallow over and over. I don’t lie and I’m not good at it. I’ve never had a reason to be. “Lionel told me not to… and it was too heavy and I dropped it. I’m really sorry, Saul.”
He sighs. Runs his fingers over the broken edges and sighs again. “You’re sure you did this, Suzette? Because if we’re going to be a family, we need to be honest with each other about things. All of us need to be honest.” His eyes drift over to Lionel, who won’t look up at all.
“I didn’t mean to.” I feel sick inside. Because of the way Mom and Saul are looking at me, like I’m not the same girl I was a half hour ago. Because Saul’s pretty lamp is ruined and it was a gift for his mother. Because I don’t want him to become so angry with me that he breaks up with Mom and we never see him again.
Mom says my allowance will pay for the cost of the materials to remake it, and when we’re in the car on our way home, she tells me I’ll write and send another apology to Saul tomorrow.
But before we left, in between my mother saying good-bye to Saul and hustling me out the door, Lionel approached. He handed me a book, a collection of poems by someone named Shel Silverstein. A folded-up piece of paper was tucked into the first pages. Just one word written on notebook paper, in Lionel’s big, blocky handwriting: Thanks.
three.
Lionel’s bedroom door is cracked when I walk downstairs, so I stop and knock and he says to come in.
It looks the same: the forest-green comforter, rumpled and twisted up with his bedsheets; sneakers and sandals lying around the room where they were kicked off, none of them having landed anywhere near their match; the poster hanging above his bed, suggesting Hunter S. Thompson for sheriff. And books. Everywhere, there are books. Instead of shelving them alphabetically, he’s sorted the spines by theme: Feminists reside next to the Dead White Guys (my brother has a sense of humor), and then there are the African novelists, who he has separated by country. Nonfiction takes up an entire three-shelf bookcase.
“What’s up?” Lionel says from his spot near the foot of the bed. He’s sprawled out on the floor with a book approximately the size of a telephone directory.
“What are you reading?” I ask, leaning against the doorframe.
“This is the year I’m finally doing it.” He sticks his finger between the pages to hold his place. I give him a quizzical look until he turns the cover my way. Infinite Jest.
“Oh.” I shake my head. “That looks like homework.”
He shrugs. “I’m up to the challenge. What are you doing?”
“Going to see if they need any help with dinner,” I say, pointing toward the stairs.
Lionel nods, then gives me a sly grin. “Heard you talking to Emil this morning.”
My face instantly flushes. I forgot Lionel’s bedroom is directly above the porch. “What were you doing up?” He didn’t mention this at breakfast.
“I could ask you the same thing.” He slides an envelope into the book for a more permanent marker and sits up. “Was that planned? For him to stop by?”
“Jesus. No, okay?” I touch my face to see if it’s still warm, and I guess that answers any lingering questions of how I feel about Emil Choi. The last person I was with was a girl: Iris. But I know the feeling you get when you think about someone you want to kiss, and that feeling doesn’t change when I replace Iris with Emil. “I haven’t talked to Emil since I was home last time. He saw me sitting out there and he stopped.”
“Okay,” Lionel says in the singsongy voice he uses specifically to irritate me, and I think how good this feels, my brother teasing me like he used to. For a while, everything with him was either urgent or miserable and there was no in-between. I saw hints of his old self coming back when I was home over winter break, but I felt like I’d let him down by leaving for Dinsmore, like he didn’t trust me enough to completely be himself around me.
“What about you?” I ask. “Anyone special?”
“Nah.”
I take a deep breath before I say what I say because I know he could be touchy about it. “Do you still talk to anyone?”
He blinks at me. “Like, a therapist? That’s kind of part of the deal. Dr. Tarrasch and I are real tight.”
“No, I mean… DeeDee says she doesn’t really see you around anymore. You don’t hang out with them?”
I know for a fact he’s not hanging out with our friends. She told me last week that she hadn’t seen my brother outside of school since I invited her over for dinner during winter break.
“People ask too many questions,” Lionel says, looking down at the closed book in front of him.
“But they’re your friends.” I step into the room now. “They care. DeeDee asks about you all the time—”
“Well, Little, they stopped caring so much after you left.” He is not unkind, just matter-of-fact. “So maybe they’re your friends now.”
I open and close my mouth without speaking, but Lionel doesn’t want a response. He’s removing the envelope from the book, creasing down the page where he left off. “See you at dinner,” he says without looking up, and before, I would have pushed him, urged him to talk about it.
But we’re not back to where we were. Not yet.
And that was my cue to leave, so I step back into the hallway and shut the door.
Mom and Saul are down in the kitchen, tending to the food for Shabbat dinner. Saul always closed up his woodshop early on Fridays to come home and make the challah, and that hasn’t changed. I find him pulling the ball of dough from a bowl that he set aside so it could rise.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, smiling as I walk over to the island.
Mom looks up from her post at the stove, protected by a black apron that sports bunches of dancing grapes. “Hi there, sweet pea.”