Before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean, the organist started and the minister came out and I had to go sit down.I Spent the Entire Service Looking at That Suit
I’m not proud of it.
My father was eleven feet from me in a box and I spent forty minutes staring at the back of my brother’s shoulder wondering what could possibly have gotten into him.I’d worked out four theories by the time they finished the eulogy. Every one of them was wrong.
What My Brother and I Are Like
I should explain us before I go further, because it matters.I’m Sarah. I’m forty-four. I teach eighth grade in the district we grew up in. I live eleven minutes from the house we were raised in and I have never in my life lived more than an hour from it.
Eric is thirty-nine. He left at nineteen and came back maybe twice a year.Still reading?
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He and my father did not speak between 2016 and 2022.Why They Didn’t Speak
I’m going to be honest about it because leaving it out makes the rest of this dishonest.
Eric came home at twenty-nine and told my father he wasn’t going to take over the business.Halloran Tool & Die. My grandfather started it in 1961 in a rented bay. My father ran it for thirty-four years and he assumed — the way men of that generation assumed things without ever saying them out loud — that his son would run it next.
Eric wanted to be a musician. He played bass. He was good but he was never going to be famous and I think he knew that even then.What Dad Said
I wasn’t in the room. Eric has never told me the whole thing.
What I know is that my brother came out of that study white as paper, got in his car, and did not sit at a table with our father again for six years.The Six Years
Dad never said Eric’s name in that house if he could avoid it.
If I brought him up, my father would go quiet and then start talking about something on the news.At Christmas, my mother set a place for him for the first two years and then she stopped, and I watched her stop, and neither of us ever discussed it.
What Changed in 2022
My mother died in April of that year. Stroke, very fast.And Eric came.
