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 shit.”
“You’re going at it crooked. You always go at it crooked.”
He was on the cooler by the door with his legs kicked out. He had two Old Styles. He held one out, which meant August had to come out from under the car to take it, and he knew that, and that’s 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, which was a lie. It has never run right for more than a few weeks at a time. Their father, Errol Mills, does not sell things. He keeps them and tinkers with them when they stop working, and it was a losing game most of the time. Twenty-six years of nights at the Ford plant on Torrence just to come home and 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 bathed the garage walls. East of the ridge the Rock Island train went through, and the horn called twice before thinning out, and the crickets started singing underneath it.
Brooks talked about the freshman team he coached. He had a kid at second base who couldn’t hit to save his life, and would not stop showing up, and Brooks decided that was the more important of the two. He talked about a girl named Simone who did not yet know 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 the boys were eight.
Vance was eleven and built like a mailbox and he lived down off Charles. He took a bike from some boy named Cedric and raised it over his head in the middle of the street like he was going to break it. Then he did just that. Then he stood there over the pieces. Whatever he had wanted, he didn’t find it 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 believed, with the total faith of a woman who has too much to do, that her sons were at home sitting on the porch.
Vance came across the grass at August because August was holding the ball.
August didn’t stand up. He was eight. Instead, he looked down at his feet. There was a bottle cap pressed flat into the tar next to his shoe and he looked at that, keeping a firm grip on the ball.
Brooks stepped in front of him.
He was exactly his size. They came out of the same woman nine minutes apart and came out the same size and stayed that same size their whole lives, and nobody outside their immediate household could tell the two 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 square 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 Brooks the way he had looked at that broken bicycle. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t in there either.
He went off down Charles.
Brooks turned around with his lip open and blood on his teeth, running 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 didn’t make the cut for varsity. A waiting room at Little Company of Mary during their father’s hernia surgery, which Errol insisted he drive 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. His brother stayed on that phone an hour and ten minutes mostly to say: 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 that’s not a thing that happens, and the part nobody outside the family understood is that Brooks was not a good hitter. He was a good hitter for about eleven weeks, one time, when he was seventeen, because he 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 realized she was right about them all. She named August for August Wilson. Edith Mills had been named by her own mother after Edith Sampson, who put herself through law school at night, got sent to the United Nations and then landed on a bench in the same county. She was the first Black woman in Illinois to do that. 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 laying in their plastic bins and reached for writers, because that was the only thing she knew to do.
Their father didn’t care about any of that. Errol heard the name Brooks and thought about Brooks Robinson, who played third base in Baltimore and had one of the best gloves anybody ever saw at that position. For the rest of his life, he called that boy Robinson whenever he was proud of him. Which was constantly. And that was about as close 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 those drums there every day after school from thirteen to eighteen.
Edith never asked him to stop, either. Not one time in five years.
She would be at the sink with the water running and the floor rumbling under her feet. There was a glass on the counter that would inch itself toward the edge, and she paid it no mind.
He was good, too. He never sped up and he never dragged. August could play the same thing for forty minutes and never drift.
She would let him run for hours.
And she has never said one word to him about what that 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 didn’t say a single word to him. He grabbed the front of his jersey with both hands, staggered backward, and went down flat in the dirt with one hand over his heart.
Redd Foxx. On Sanford and Son, any time his character got cornered in an argument he would clutch his chest, stagger backwards, 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, but every one of them knew the bit cold.
The dugout came apart. The 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 start going on 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 during 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 shopping 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 doesn’t walk to the store. He’d been on a plane twice in his life and both times were for funerals.
He didn’t tell anybody he was going. 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 at four.
There was somebody with him.
Brooks looked past him for about a half second. Then he put his hand out and said his own name, first and last, the way their father taught them both to do. The three of them went and got food on Mass Ave and Brooks was funny for two hours. He talked about the White Sox. About a trade everybody knew was never going to happen. He asked how the food was and how August was managing through the winter. He never let a silence last more than a second and he didn’t ask a single question that had to be answered.
He slept on the floor two nights and flew home Sunday.
August rode out to Logan with him. The two stood at the curb at Terminal B, the wind coming off the harbor, and neither said anything, which never happened. Silence around Brooks was a weather event.
Then his brother wrapped both arms around him and held him about a half-second longer than they normally did.
That was all. He picked up his duffel bag and entered through the doors.
He never said anything about it. Not that night. Not that year. Not once in the seven years that they had left. Not a question, 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 joke about this. Ever.
It wasn’t that he was failing to bring it up. He decided not to, every time, for seven years.
August understood that at the time.
The only person who ever knew that about him is now buried out at Restvale. So it’s not an unfinished conversation. Unfinished would mean they could still do something about it. It’s closed. The only thing either of them ever said about it was a hug at the curb that went on a half 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.
Edith 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 before, and you don’t go around changing that because one of them is gone.
Edith cooks like it’s still four. Which, for her, means she cooks like it’s eight. She’s never once in her life cooked the right amount of food.
Errol sits with his back to the window and doesn’t talk. Twenty-six years of nights puts a man on a different clock than the rest of the house, and he kept that clock after he came home. He eats, he listens, and 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 the sink and set the table, which has been his job since he was six. He put down four plates.
She came up behind him and picked one up.
She said nothing about it. She didn’t 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 his shoulders 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 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 grew too thick. It got too big and then it couldn’t do what it needed to do.”
She rinsed a few more dishes.
“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 the city gives up nine days a year.
Sunday league at Ridge Park. Grown men who were no good anymore playing a game they had never been quite good enough at, in jerseys from a body shop on Western. Brooks organized the whole thing. 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 for them to say no.
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 game trying to get Brooks to notice him, and Brooks noticed him the whole game.
In the fourth inning Brooks 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 helmet off, which you are not supposed to do until you are back in the dugout, and held it up high pointing across the diamond to his mother. She did that thing with the hand. The thing where she waves you off, proud of you.
Brooks put his 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’d done it four thousand times. Because he’d just put one off the fence. Because it was sixty-eight degrees and my mother was down the line in a folding chair, the family was all in the stands cheering him on, 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 would always film.
I have watched that video more times than I will ever tell anybody.
Eleven seconds.
I didn’t need the video to know that. I’ve been counting time since I was thirteen. Anybody else on that field might 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 on a clear day and laughed.
Then Curtis Ford, who played first base, who we’d known since we were nine, stopped laughing. That’s 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’s 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 on it, and I’ve taken apart every object anybody ever put in front of me since I was four years old, and I got down in that 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 don’t have to count. I didn’t need a song. I had that speed in my hands, and I’d 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 that it had not been true.
Forty kids came to the funeral in their uniforms.
Nobody organized that. Somebody’s mother put it in a group text on Tuesday and by Friday there were forty of them outside the funeral home in road grays with their hats in their hands, fourteen and fifteen years old, standing very straight, trying to do it right because somebody told them this is a thing where you do it right.
The second baseman who couldn’t hit was 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 don’t 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 the same voice.
At the repast afterward, in the church hall with the food laid out across long tables, my mother sat down next to me with a plate she wasn’t going to eat. She put her hand on my forearm and asked me, quietly, the way you ask about the weather, if there was anybody I wanted to bring. Anybody at all. She just didn’t 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 one 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 for an hour.
He hasn’t driven it since. He starts it about once a week. He lets it run a while and then he shuts it off.
He’s 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’s the kind of 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 words like 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 him. There’s no difference. Not one. The difference is that one of those hearts stopped working on a Sunday afternoon in a place where there was no machine, and mine has not stopped yet, and now there’s a machine.
It sits under my left collarbone. It’s about the size of a pocket watch and you can see the shape of it through my 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. 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 tell 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’ve been nineteen times. The first four I mostly talked about the car.
The drums are still in the basement, in the corner under the joists.
I’ve 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 don’t. She’s not said a word about it, because this family does not do that.
She hasn’t moved them either. Everything is exactly where it was. There’s still a towel folded over the piano stool.
Some night this winter I’m going to go down there and sit on it. She’s going to be at the sink upstairs with the water running, and she’s going to hear the first thing her son has said out loud in a year.
She’s not going to come down. She’s going to stand there with her hands in the water and let it run.
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 hasn’t said anything new. Not once. Every word that man says to me now is a word he already said to me, handed back across the garage, and both of the hands doing the handing are mine.
Which means there is a bottom to it all. Somewhere down there is the last thing my brother ever said to me that I still have, and one day I’m going to reach for one and there’s not going to be any left.
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 Mama 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’s the part nobody tells you. I didn’t know it until it was happening to me. You don’t stay with them. You don’t hold still. Every morning you get up and you’re further out ahead, and there’s no way to stop it, and the only way to stop it is the thing I’m not going to do.
He is twenty-seven. He’s going to be twenty-seven forever.
I’m going to be forty. I’m going to be sixty. They’re going to change the battery in this thing four or five more times and I’m going to get old in a way my brother never will, and I’m 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’m going to make them last as long as I can.