The detective turned the knob of the den door very slowly, with one hand on his holster and the other raised to stop me, and two uniformed officers stood behind us in the hall. The phone was still ringing in there, a small tinny melody from a cheap prepaid, buzzing against a wooden desk. The door swung open on the afternoon dimness, and I smelled old wool and cough drops, and then I saw them. Two people. An old man in the leather recliner of my late husband, wrapped to his chin in a plaid afghan, and an old woman in the desk chair with a phone in her lap.
Neither of them moved. The woman had gray hair in a bun and a pale blue cardigan buttoned wrong, and she held the ringing phone in both hands as if it were a bird. The man was thin, flushed, shivering, with a fever on his face. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I felt the floor tilt under my feet. I knew that forehead. I knew the high cheekbones and the left ear that stuck out a little. He was Merv, thirty years older, thinner, but Merv. “Phyllis,” he whispered. “Please do not be afraid. I could not make myself knock.”
It was not my husband, of course. It was his brother. Dwight Ortmann, seventy two years old, whom I had not seen since the funeral of their mother in 1998, when the two men had stood on either side of an open grave and shouted about forty acres of dry alfalfa land in Delta. The woman beside him was his wife, Jean. She set the phone on the desk and stood up and said, “Mrs. Ortmann, I am so sorry. This is entirely my fault.” Then she began to cry, quietly, with her hands over her face.
Two old men can lose a brother over a field, and then spend the rest of their lives walking toward the gate they slammed.
The detective, a patient man named Okafor, called for an ambulance, because Dwight was burning with fever and could barely sit up. While we waited, Jean told me what happened. Their only son, Danny, had died in a car accident two years ago, and it had broken something in Dwight. He had stopped sleeping. He kept saying that he had to see his brother. In June, a cousin told them that Merv had passed in the spring. Dwight had gone gray. He wanted to see the grave. He wanted to say sorry to a man who could not hear him.
They had driven from Montrose on Thursday, the two of them, in an old Buick with a bad muffler. Dwight still had the key that Merv had given him in 1990, which I had never known about, hidden under the third flowerpot on my back step. They had stood at the door three times and he could not turn the knob. So on Friday, while I was at the cemetery, they had let themselves in just to see the house his brother had lived in. And then they could not make themselves leave. They had slept in the den like two frightened children, and Jean had left a twenty dollar bill under the sugar bowl.
The photographs, the forty of them, were Dwight. He had a phone that had belonged to Danny, which he had never let go of, and he used it to take pictures of me from the road. He wanted to see if I was well, he said. He wanted to learn my face before he dared to speak. Jean had begged him to knock. The prepaid phone that I had called was hers, the one with the number saved under Mom, because that was what Danny had called her. When I phoned, she had panicked and said the first true thing she could. Her son was dead. And please do not let Dwight see you have his phone.
I thought I would be furious. I had been terrified for a day and a half, I had lain awake with a chair against my bedroom door, and I had every right. But I stood in the doorway of Merv den, looking at a feverish old man and a weeping wife, and what I felt instead was a kind of terrible tenderness. Dwight had his brother hands. He had the same crooked little finger. He lifted one of them toward me and said, “I just wanted to ask if he ever forgave me.” And I said, “Dwight, he talked about you every Christmas.”
It was not entirely true. But it was true enough. Merv had kept a shoebox of letters from his brother that he never answered, and a photograph of two boys on a tractor, and on the back of it, in his small neat hand, my brother is a stubborn fool and so am I. I had found it in 2023 and had put it in the drawer of the den desk. I opened the drawer now and gave it to Dwight. He held it to his chest and sobbed. The paramedics arrived, and he let them lay him on the stretcher, and he did not let go of the picture.
He had pneumonia. He spent eleven days at St. Mary hospital, and I visited every afternoon with a thermos of soup. Jean slept in the den. On the day he was discharged, he asked for a lawyer, and the lawyer drew up a deed. Dwight gave me his half of the forty acres in Delta, outright, signed with a shaking hand. I wanted to refuse. Jean put her hand on mine and said, “Please. Let him do one thing right.” I took it. I planted it in the spring with winter wheat, and I hired a young man from the farm bureau to look after it.
Dwight lived through the summer. On Wednesday mornings, I wheeled him to Orchard Mesa Cemetery in a borrowed chair, with Jean walking beside us carrying a thermos, and we sat at the foot of Merv headstone in the sun. He talked to his brother in a low voice. I never listened. In October he died in his sleep in the guest room, holding the old photograph, and we buried him beside Merv, with their mother land blowing golden in the wind. Jean still lives in my den. We watch the Book Cliffs go purple in the evenings, and she calls me her sister.