The garage door was up and the light came in low along the floor. October light. It gets under everything at that hour and makes the concrete look wet.
August had the Monte Carlo on jacks and his hands up in the wheel well.
“You’re going to strip that,” Brooks said.
“I’m not going to strip it.”
“You’re going at it crooked. You always go at it crooked.”
He was on the cooler by the door with his legs out. He had two beers. He held one out, which meant August had to come out from under the car to take it, and he knew that, and that is why he did it.
Their father bought this car the year they were born. Nineteen ninety-seven, off a man in Blue Island who swore it had been garage-kept. It had not been garage-kept. It has never run right for more than a season at a time. Errol Mills does not sell things. He keeps them and feeds them and loses to them slowly, twenty-six years of nights at the Ford plant on Torrence and then home in the morning to lie down under something broken.
August opened his beer. Brooks set his on the bench.
“Mama wants us Sunday.”
“I know.”
“She wants us at two and she’s going to say four.”
“I know what she’s going to say.”
“Then be there at two.” Two fingers, pointed. “You’re the one she calls.”
The light went down the wall. East of the ridge the Rock Island train went through and the horn came twice and then thinned out, and the crickets came up underneath it.
Brooks talked about the freshman team he coached. He had a kid at second base who could not hit and would not stop showing up, and he had decided this was the more important of the two abilities. He talked about a girl named Simone who did not know yet how much trouble she was in. He talked about the car.
“You’re going to strip that,” he said.
“You said that.”
“Then hear it twice.”
His beer sat on the bench and sweated and went warm and he never opened it.
The summer of Vance Otter they were eight.
He was eleven and built like a mailbox and he lived down off Charles. He took a bike from a boy named Cedric and held it over his head in the middle of the street like he was going to break it. Then he broke it. Then he stood over the pieces. Whatever he had wanted, it was not in there.
They were not supposed to be down there. Their mother worked thirty-one years at the post office on Vincennes. She left before seven and she believed, with the total faith of a woman who has too much to do, that her sons were on the porch.
Vance came across the grass at August because August was holding the ball.
He did not stand up. He was eight. He looked down. There was a bottle cap pressed flat into the tar next to his shoe and he looked at that, and he kept hold of the ball.
Brooks stepped in front of him.
Brooks was exactly his size. They came out of the same woman nine minutes apart and came out the same size and stayed the same size their whole lives, and nobody outside that house could tell them apart until they opened their mouths. He put his arm back over his brother’s chest like a seatbelt and said, to a boy three years older and forty pounds heavier:
“Nah.”
That was all he said.
Vance hit him in the mouth and he went down on the blacktop. He got up and stood in front of his brother again. Vance hit him again. He got up again. By the third time Vance was looking at him the way he had looked at the pieces of that bike. Whatever he had come for, it was not in this either.
He went off down Charles.
Brooks turned around with his lip open and blood on his teeth and down the front of a shirt their mother was going to see, and he was grinning like a lunatic.
“I got you,” he said.
August has heard that maybe four thousand times since. The spring he did not make varsity. A waiting room at Little Company of Mary during their father’s hernia surgery, which the man had insisted on driving himself to. Two in the morning his second winter in Cambridge, from a stairwell on Vassar Street, when he called because nothing at all was wrong and there was too much of everything at once, and his brother stayed on that phone an hour and ten minutes and mostly said: I got you. I’m right here. I got you.
Nine minutes older. He never let it go.
There were two instruments in that house.
Brooks had a bat. He hit .411 his senior year, which is four hits out of every ten and is not a thing that happens, and the part nobody outside the family understood is that he was not a good hitter. He was a good hitter for eleven weeks, one time, when he was seventeen, because he had decided to be. Whatever Brooks Mills decided to be, he became for a while.
He played third base and he wore number five, for the other Brooks, the one their mother had not named him for.
She named him for Gwendolyn Brooks, who lived on the South Side and wrote poems about the people on her own block until the country admitted she was right about them. She named August for August Wilson. Edith Mills had been named by her own mother for Edith Sampson, who put herself through law school at night and got sent to the United Nations and then got put on a bench in this county, the first Black woman in Illinois anybody could say that about. Edith spent her whole working life explaining that across a counter on Vincennes. When she came up with two boys at once she looked at them in their plastic bins and reached for writers, because that was the only thing she knew to do.
Their father did not care about any of that. Errol heard the name Brooks and thought about Brooks Robinson, who played third base in Baltimore and had the best glove anybody ever saw at that position, and for the rest of his life he called that boy Robinson when he was proud of him. Which was constantly. Which was as close as the man ever got to saying it.
August had the drums in the basement. A used five-piece kit, four hundred dollars from a man in Oak Lawn in 2009, money his mother did not technically have. He sat on a piano stool with a towel folded over it because the seat that came with it was broken. He set the kit up in the northwest corner under the joists where the ceiling was lowest and he played down there every day after school from thirteen to eighteen.
Edith never asked him to stop. Not one time in five years.
She would be at the sink with the water running and the floor going under her feet. There was a glass on the counter that would walk itself toward the edge, and she left it there.
He was good. He never sped up and he never dragged. He could play the same thing for forty minutes and it would not drift.
She would let it run an hour.
She has never said one word to him about what it meant.
It meant she knew where he was. It meant he was in the house.
The bit started that spring.
They were playing Marist and the umpire called him out on a pitch that was nowhere near the plate. Brooks did not say a word to him. He grabbed the front of his own jersey with both hands, staggered backward, and went down flat in the dirt with one hand over his heart.
That was Redd Foxx. On Sanford and Son, any time his character got cornered in an argument he would clutch his chest and stagger and call out to his dead wife. Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you, honey. The show had been off the air for twenty years before any of those boys were born and every one of them knew the bit cold.
The dugout came apart. His coach, a man named Pulaski, had to put his hat over his face. The umpire threw him out of the game for it, and he lay there in the dirt with his eyes shut, laughing, until somebody made him get up.
After that it was his. Anytime. Anywhere. Their mother would say one sentence about the condition of his apartment and he would clutch his chest and go down in her kitchen, taking a dish towel with him. He did it at Thanksgiving. He did it at their cousin Andre’s wedding, during the toast. He did it in the Jewel parking lot on Western over the last good cart.
He did it for twenty years.
Twenty years is a long time to teach everybody who loves you that a man holding his chest is a joke.
In February of his third year in Cambridge, Brooks got on an airplane.
His brother did not go places. He drove to the Jewel on Western, two blocks from the house, and when August gave him grief about it he said a grown man does not walk to the store. He had been on a plane twice in his life and both times it was for a funeral.
He did not tell anybody he was coming. He flew into Logan on a Friday with a duffel bag and no real coat, took the train out to Kendall in a Sox hoodie in a Boston February, and stood outside the building on Vassar Street until his brother came out of it at four.
There was somebody with him.
Brooks looked past him for about a second and a half. Then he put his hand out and said his own name, first and last, the way their father taught them both to do it. The three of them went and got food on Mass Ave and he was funny for two hours. He talked about the White Sox. He talked about a trade everybody knew was never going to happen. He asked how the food was and how August was getting through the winter. He never let a silence last more than a second and he did not ask one question that had to be answered.
He slept on the floor two nights and flew home Sunday.
August rode out to Logan with him. They stood at the curb at Terminal B in the wind coming off the harbor and neither of them said anything, which never happened. Silence around Brooks was a weather event.
Then his brother put both arms around him and held on about a half-second past where the two of them normally left it.
That was all. He picked up the duffel and went in through the doors.
He never said anything about it. Not that night. Not that year. Not once in the seven years that were left. Not a question and not a joke, and the man made jokes about everything on this earth, he made a joke at a funeral, he made a joke during their mother’s mammogram scare. He did not make one about this. Ever.
He was not failing to bring it up. He was deciding not to, every time, for seven years.
August understood that at the time.
The only person who ever knew that about him is buried out at Restvale now. So it is not an unfinished conversation. Unfinished would mean there was still something he could do about it. It is closed. The only thing either of them ever said about it was a hug at the curb that went on half a second too long.
He came home in 2019 and took the research job and moved into an apartment nine minutes from his mother’s house. Brooks never said anything about that either. That was deliberate too.
She has been setting four places since March.
The house on Oakley has a dining room nobody eats in except at Christmas. They eat in the kitchen. Four chairs, because there were four of them, and you do not go out and change that because one of them is gone.
Edith cooks like it is still four. She cooks like it is eight. She has never once in her life cooked a correct amount of food.
Errol sits with his back to the window and does not talk. Twenty-six years of nights puts a man on a different clock than the rest of the house, and he kept the clock after he came off the shift. He eats. He listens. About once an hour he says something so dry and so exactly aimed that everybody has to put a fork down.
August got there at two. He washed his hands at her sink and set the table, which has been his job since he was six, and he put down four plates.
She came up behind him and picked one up.
She said nothing about it. She did not look at him. She carried it back to the cabinet and set it on the stack and closed the door soft, the way you close a door on a sleeping child. Then she came back and laid her hand flat on his back between the shoulder blades and left it there while she reached past him for the salt.
That is still the whole conversation.
He asked her once, in the spring, badly, what the doctors actually said in the room. She was at the sink with her back to him.
“They used a lot of words,” she said. “The wall of it got too thick. It got too big and then it couldn’t do what it was built to do.”
She rinsed a pan.
“His heart was too big,” she said. “That’s what they told me. They told me my son’s heart was too big for him.”
May seventeenth. A Sunday. Sixty-eight degrees and the kind of clear this town gives up nine days a year.
Sunday league at Ridge Park. Grown men who were not good anymore playing a game they had never been quite good enough at, in jerseys from a body shop on Western. Brooks organized it. Of course he organized it. Fourteen men on a text thread and half of them only came because he would call them personally on Saturday night and make it impossible.
Edith was down the first base line in a folding chair with a cooler. Simone was there. Ricky Pulaski’s boy was there, six years old, and he spent the whole afternoon trying to get Brooks to notice him, and Brooks noticed him the whole afternoon.
In the fourth inning he hit a triple.
He put it off the fence in left center and made it all the way to third without having to slide, and he was so pleased with himself that he took his batting helmet off, which you are not supposed to do until you are back in the dugout, and held it up down the line to his mother. She did the thing with the hand. The thing where she waves you off and she is proud of you.
He put the helmet back on.
Then he stood up off the bag and grabbed the front of his jersey with both hands.
August was coaching third. He was eleven feet away.
He laughed.
I laughed.
I laughed because he had done it four thousand times. Because he had just put one off the fence. Because it was sixty-eight degrees and my mother was down the line in a folding chair with a cooler and there was nothing anywhere in that afternoon that had anything wrong with it.
He went backward into the dirt with his hand over his heart.
The infield laughed. My mother laughed. Ricky’s boy laughed because everyone else was laughing. Somebody in the dugout hollered Elizabeth. Somebody had a phone up, because people filmed him. He was the one people filmed.
I have watched that video more times than I am going to tell anybody.
Eleven seconds.
I did not need the video to know that. I have been counting time since I was thirteen. Anybody else on that field would have told you it was a few seconds, a moment, no time at all. I knew what it was while it was happening.
For eleven seconds I stood eleven feet from my brother in good weather and laughed.
Then Curtis Ford, who played first base, who I had known since we were nine, stopped laughing. That is what I still hear. Not the laughing. The sound of one man’s laugh stopping in the middle of itself.
I got to him and his eyes were open and were not looking at anything.
I know how things work. That is my whole life and my whole job. I know how a thing is supposed to move and what it sounds like when the tolerance goes out of it, and I have taken apart every object anybody ever put in front of me since I was four years old, and I got down in the dirt next to my brother and put my hands on his chest and did not know one single thing.
I put the heel of my hand on the middle of his chest and pushed. I did it wrong for the first few and then I did it right.
You push a hundred times a minute, a little faster if you can. They teach it to you with a song so you do not have to count. I did not need the song. I had that speed in my hands and I had had it since before my voice changed.
So I knelt in the dirt at Ridge Park and played the only thing I was ever any good at, in perfect time, on my brother’s chest. I did it for four minutes and eleven seconds, until the ambulance came across the grass from the Longwood gate.
I told him I got you the whole time.
It was not true. It was the first time in either of our lives it had not been true.
Forty kids came to the funeral in their uniforms.
Nobody organized that. Somebody’s mother put it on a group text on Tuesday and by Friday there were forty of them outside the funeral home in gray road uniforms with their hats in their hands, fourteen and fifteen years old, standing very straight, trying to do it right because somebody had told them this is a thing where you do it right.
The second baseman who could not hit is named Malik. He got four words out at that podium and then stood there and cried in front of three hundred people. Then he finished. He finished the whole thing. I do not remember a word of it. I remember that the boy finished.
My father did not speak. He shook every hand in that building, three hundred of them, for two hours and ten minutes, and said thank you for coming three hundred times in exactly the same voice.
At the repast afterward, in the church hall with the food laid out on long tables, my mother sat down next to me with a plate she was not going to eat. She put her hand on my forearm and asked me, quiet, the way you ask about the weather, whether there was anybody I wanted to bring. Anybody at all. She just did not want me sitting in that apartment by myself after.
I said no.
She patted my arm twice and got up to see about the ham.
Then my father went home and went out to the garage and finished the Monte Carlo.
He did it alone over nine days. He never asked me. He got the exhaust done and the timing right and got it to turn over on the third try on a Tuesday morning in June, and it ran. For the first time since 1997 the thing ran. He sat in that car in the driveway with the door open and his feet on the concrete and let it idle an hour.
He has not driven it since. He starts it about once a week. He lets it run a while and then he shuts it off.
He has never said one word about why he does it. Nobody in that house has ever needed him to.
They tested me in July.
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The heart muscle grows too thick to do its job, and it is the thing that takes young athletes on fields in good weather. It runs in families, which means it was always going to be in me, because we were identical. Because we were the same document printed twice.
The cardiologist brought the scan up and showed me the wall of my own heart, thickened, the same as his, the exact same as his. She told me I had it. Then she told me I was going to be fine.
I asked her to say that again.
She said it again. She said manageable and monitored and implantable, and I sat in that chair and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is this.
There is nothing wrong with me that was not also wrong with Brooks. There is no difference. Not one. The difference is that one of those hearts stopped on a Sunday afternoon in a place where there was no machine, and mine has not stopped yet, and now there is a machine.
It sits under my left collarbone. It is about the size of a pocket watch and you can see the shape of it through the skin. If my heart ever stops the way his did, it shocks it back. The battery is good for eight to ten years and then they go in and change it.
It does nothing. It has never done anything. It is waiting, in some parking lot or stairwell or Sunday afternoon that has not happened yet, to do the exact thing nobody at Ridge Park could do for my brother.
That is what I carry. Not the memory of him. The machine that would have saved him, running on a battery, under my collarbone, for the rest of my life.
In August I stood on the platform at 107th with two grocery bags.
I stood where I always stand, at the north end. A train came in and the doors opened and people got off and the doors closed and it went south toward Blue Island.
I did not get on it. I had not meant to get on it. I was not going anywhere. I had come from the car and I had two bags in my hands and I had walked up the steps onto that platform for no reason I could give anybody, and I stood there a long time after it left.
Then I picked up the bags and went down and drove home and put the groceries away, and the milk went in the door of the refrigerator where the milk goes.
I started seeing a therapist on Ninety-Fifth in the fall. I have been nineteen times. The first four I mostly talked about the car.
The drums are still in the basement, in the northwest corner under the joists.
I have not sat down at them since the sixteenth of May. I go down there for the water heater and the storm windows and I do not look at that corner. My mother knows I do not. She has not said a word about it, because this family does not.
She has not moved them either. Everything is exactly where it was. There is still a towel folded over the piano stool.
Some night this winter I am going to go down there and sit on it. She is going to be at the sink two floors up with the water running, and she is going to hear the first thing her son has said out loud in a year.
She is not going to come down. She is going to stand there with her hands in the water and let it run an hour.
So I go out to the garage.
The door is up and the light comes in low along the floor. October light. It gets under everything at that hour and makes the concrete look wet.
The Monte Carlo is out there and it runs now. My father fixed it and is never going to drive it and nobody in that family will ever ask him to.
I take two beers out of the refrigerator.
I open one. I set the other on the bench where the light comes across the can. It sweats. After a while it stops sweating and goes warm, and at the end of the night I pour it out in the grass by the gutter.
And then I talk, and my brother answers.
He has the voice. He has the little breath before the funny part. He has the two fingers.
You’re going to strip that.
I know.
You’re going at it crooked. You always go at it crooked.
I know.
Mama wants us Sunday. She’s going to say four but she wants us at two. You’re the one she calls.
I know. I know. I know.
I noticed it in the spring and it took me most of the summer to work out what I had noticed, which is that he has not said anything new. Not once. Every word that man says to me now is a word he already gave me, handed back across a garage, and both of the hands doing the handing are mine.
Which means there is a bottom to it. Somewhere down there is the last thing my brother ever said to me that I still have, and one day I am going to reach for one and there is not going to be one there.
So I am careful with them now. I ration.
Brooks was nine minutes older for twenty-seven years.
He never let it go. He used it about bedtime and about the front seat and about which of us had to call our mother when the other one had done something. He came out of that room first and he stepped in front of me first and he did it for twenty-seven years without being asked to one time, ever.
I have been the older one for a year and four months.
That is the part nobody tells you. I did not know it until it was happening to me. You do not stay with them. You do not hold still. Every morning you get up and you are further out ahead, and there is no way to stop, and the only way to stop is the thing I am not going to do.
He is twenty-seven. He is going to be twenty-seven forever.
I am going to be forty. I am going to be sixty. They are going to change the battery in this thing four or five more times and I am going to get old in a way my brother never will, and I am going to keep walking out into that garage with two cans in my hand, further and further out ahead of him, carrying everything he ever said to me.
Nine minutes.
I am going to make them last as long as I can.