And then I understood, all at once, why my brother spent his last five years pushing me away.
The cabinet was full of paper, and the paper was medical. Neurology, the letterhead said, out of Tulsa. The top letter was dated five years back, almost to the month that Jimmy quit calling me, and it used two words I had to read three times before they went in. Early onset. My brother, in his mid-fifties at the time, had been told he was starting to lose his mind, and he had gone home to Sapulpa and locked the news in a metal cabinet and started backing away from everyone who loved him.
There were appointment cards. A prescription list a mile long. And there was a legal folder, an advance directive, spelling out what he wanted at the end, and my name was in it. Not to visit. Not to help. Just, if it came to it, to decide. He had trusted me with the very last of him and told me nothing about any of the rest.
Down at the bottom, in an envelope with my name on it that he never mailed, was a single page in his handwriting, which got worse toward the end of it. If you are reading this I am gone and you are mad at me and you are right to be. I could not let you watch me forget your face. Let me stay the brother you knew.
Five years I thought I had done something. Five years I ran back over every word we ever said, hunting for the sin that turned my own brother cold. There was no sin. There was a man trying to hand me the good memory instead of the bad one, the only way he knew how, which was to break both our hearts on purpose and take the worse half himself.
His heart took him before the other thing could, at fifty-nine, in his sleep. I used to think that was cruel. Now I think it might have been the one mercy in the whole business. He got to go still himself.
I did not stay angry. You cannot stay angry at a man for loving you clumsy. I wish to God he had let me in. I would have sat with him through every hour of it and counted it a privilege. But I understand why he did not, and understanding is its own kind of peace, and I will take it.
I hunted the flea markets, I mean I hunted, until I found us a booth like the one at the Cracker Barrel off the turnpike, the very place we split a booth at every Sunday coming up. I go the first Sunday of every month and I order for two, biscuits and gravy, his and mine, and I sit with my brother the way we used to. He gave me the whole man to keep. The least I can do is keep him.